This plugin adds a Search Terms Report option to the Tools menu. Use the report to download a file, which you can open in a spreadsheet, of the words and phrases staff type into the intranet search, with the number of times each was searched for, most searched first.
What staff search for is the best evidence you have of what they come to the intranet to do. Use this report to find your top tasks, to check that your most searched terms lead to the right page, and to learn the words staff really use.
Only administrators can use the report.
What the search terms report needs
- Relevanssi Premium must be installed and active. The Search Terms Report option does not appear in the Tools menu without it.
- Relevanssi’s search log must be switched on. The report reads that log. Switch it on in Relevanssi’s Logging settings. Nothing is recorded before you switch it on.
Relevanssi can also be set to delete log entries after a number of days. The report cannot go back further than the log does. If the log is trimmed after 60 days, a report for “all dates” covers the last 60 days. Lengthen that setting in Relevanssi if you want to compare one year with the next.
Download the search terms report
- Go to Tools, then Search Terms Report.
- Optional: enter the Number of terms you want.
- Optional: choose a Start date and an End date.
- Optional: tick Only searches that found nothing.
- Select Download search terms report.
Your browser downloads a file. The file name says which period the report covers, followed by the date and time you ran it, such as search-terms-report-2026-09-01-to-2026-09-30-20261001093000.csv.
Options for the search terms report
Number of terms
How many search terms to list, starting with the most searched. Leave it blank for every term. Enter a number, such as 100, for a shorter list of your top terms. A full report ends with many terms that were searched for only once.
Choose the dates
- Both dates blank: every search in the log.
- Start date and End date: searches from the start of the Start date to the end of the End date. For the whole of September, enter 1 September to 30 September.
- Start date only: searches from the Start date up to now.
- End date only: every search up to the end of the End date.
If you enter the dates the wrong way round, the report swaps them.
Only searches that found nothing
Tick this to list only the searches that returned no results at all, most frequent first. This is the quickest way to find content gaps and the words staff use that your content does not. The file name then includes “found-nothing”. Some rows in this list come from automated scanners rather than staff: see Odd terms that are not from staff.
What the search terms report contains
There is one row for each search term, with the most searched at the top.
- Count: how many times the term was searched for in the period.
- Terms: the word or phrase, exactly as it was typed, in lower case.
- Found nothing: how many of those searches returned no results.
- Average results: the average number of results those searches returned. A very high number means the term is too broad to be useful, and staff have to pick through a long list.
The last two columns appear if your version of Relevanssi records the number of results for each search.
Each different wording is a separate row. “Annual leave”, “leave” and “holiday” are counted separately, as are spelling mistakes, so add related rows together when you look for your top tasks. Capital letters make no difference: “HR” and “hr” are counted together.
The report does not show who searched. Search terms can still contain personal data, because staff search for colleagues by name. Keep the file somewhere suitable and delete it when you have finished with it.
Odd terms that are not from staff
Some rows in the report are not words anyone typed. They look like web addresses, file names or code, such as /index/thinkapp/invokefunction, wp-login, .env, xmlrpc.php, or a long path full of slashes and brackets. They nearly all found nothing, so they stand out when you tick Only searches that found nothing, and a single one can have a Count in the hundreds.
These rows come from automated scanners that sweep the internet looking for websites with known security flaws. A scanner tries thousands of addresses on your site. One of them is the search address: on any WordPress site, the site address followed by ?s= and a term. The scanner’s probe uses the same letter s for its own purposes, so WordPress treats whatever follows as a search term, runs the search, finds nothing, and Relevanssi records it in the log exactly as it would a search by a member of staff. This usually happens on intranets that use single sign-on too, because the search runs before the visitor is sent to sign in.
They are not a sign that the intranet has been broken into. The scanner is asking whether a flaw exists, and the only answer it got was an empty search results page. The log records the question, not a successful attack. The report also records nothing about where the request came from. If you want reassurance, ask your hosting team to confirm that the site and its plugins are up to date.
Treat the rows as noise. In the spreadsheet, sort or filter the Terms column and delete rows that begin with a slash, end in .php or .env, or mention wp-login, thinkapp or invokefunction, before you count your top tasks or content gaps. There is no setting in the Search Terms Report to leave them out, and the list of users to leave out of the log in Relevanssi’s Logging settings is for named accounts, not for anonymous visitors. If Relevanssi is set to delete log entries after a number of days, the rows disappear on their own.
If the noise gets in the way, there are two things to ask for:
- Ask Agento to stop the intranet logging searches from visitors who are not signed in. The theme already keeps the search box’s suggestions out of the log, but it does not yet leave out visitors who are not signed in, so this is a small change to the theme.
- Ask your hosting team, or whoever runs the firewall, to block requests whose search term looks like a path or a known probe, or to block the addresses the scanner comes from. They can see where the requests come from; the report cannot.
Open the search terms report in a spreadsheet
The columns in the file are separated by tabs. Numbers on a Mac and Google Sheets usually open the file in columns straight away. If Excel shows everything in one column, select that column, choose Data, then Text to Columns, choose Delimited, tick Tab and select Finish.
Staff can type anything into the search box. If a term begins with an equals sign, a plus sign, a minus sign or an at sign, the report puts an apostrophe in front of it. This stops a spreadsheet treating what someone typed as a formula.
Ideas for using the search terms report
- Find your top tasks. On most intranets a small number of terms make up a large share of all searches. Check that each of your top 20 terms leads straight to the right page.
- Test your search. Search for each of your top terms yourself. If the best page is not first, pin it to that term in Relevanssi, or add the term to the page’s Keywords box. See Promote items in search results.
- Use the words staff use. If staff search for “holiday” and your page is called “Annual leave”, add “holiday” to its Keywords box, and think about the title. See Learn the difference between tags and keywords.
- Put top tasks where staff can see them. Terms that are searched for every day are good candidates for the homepage and for your How do I? page.
- Watch the calendar. Run the report for the same month each year. Searches for pay awards, appraisals and the staff survey come round on schedule, so publish or refresh that content just before.
- Look for content gaps. Tick Only searches that found nothing. A term that staff search for and get nothing back is either a page you need to write, or a page that exists but uses different words. For the second kind, add the term to that page’s Keywords box.
- Skip the noise. Before you count content gaps, delete the rows that look like web addresses or file names. See Odd terms that are not from staff.
- Check your busiest terms for dead ends. In the full report, a term with a high Count and a Found nothing figure close to it is letting a lot of people down.
What the search terms report does not include
- Which result staff chose, or whether they found what they wanted.
- Who searched, or from where.
- Questions asked of the Agento Intelligence assistant. Those are logged separately, under Tools, Agento Intel Logs, if logging is switched on.