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Jun 25, 2026

slug: search-analytics title: Search analytics section: Administration

Search analytics

The Search analytics dashboard (Admin -> Search -> Analytics, or /admin/search/analytics) shows what people are searching for in your Heratio instance and which queries are coming up empty.

What you see

  • Totals strip - total searches, unique queries, zero-result searches and overall click-through rate (CTR) for the selected window (default 30 days).
  • Top queries - the 20 most-run queries by execution count, with per-query clicks, CTR, average result count and last-seen timestamp.
  • Zero-result queries - the 20 most-run queries that returned no hits. This is your content-gap and synonym-dictionary backlog.

A small re-run icon next to each row jumps straight to the search page with that query pre-filled.

Window

The single control on the page is Window (days) - between 1 and 365. Refresh recomputes all four panels from ahg_search_query_log.

Click-through rate

CTR is computed as

clicks(query) / executions(query)

A click counts when a user opens a result from a search-result list. Multiple clicks per execution are de-duplicated to the latest position the user selected.

Privacy

  • Logged-in searchers are recorded against their user ID.
  • Anonymous searchers are recorded against a SHA-256 hash of their IP. The raw IP is never stored.
  • The query string itself is stored verbatim (truncated to 512 characters). Treat the table as personally-identifiable data if your jurisdiction requires it.

Retention

There is no automatic purge of ahg_search_query_log. Pick a retention window that fits your local rules and schedule the appropriate DELETE via your DBA's normal data-lifecycle path.

Where the data comes from

Every call to /search and /search/advanced writes a row. The front-end calls /search/track-click when a user opens a result so the click-position column can be filled in.

If the table is empty, either the search controller has not yet been hit since the table was created, or the database insert is silently failing - check storage/logs/laravel-<date>.log for any SearchAnalyticsService::recordQuery failed debug lines.