The questions people really ask Google before they find you
Google already recorded them. They are sitting in Search Console, mixed in with everything else. One custom regex pulls out just the questions — and that list is a content plan written by your own visitors.
How to do it
About five minutes, and you only ever have to set it up once.
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1. Open Google Search Console
Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the Google account that owns your site. If the site is not there yet, add it as a property and verify it — the DNS or HTML-file method both work, and data starts collecting from that day.
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2. Open the Performance report
In the left sidebar choose Performance → Search results. This is every query that showed your site in Google, with its clicks, impressions and average position.
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3. Add the filter
Click + New filter (older accounts say Add filter), pick Query, then open the dropdown and choose Custom (regex). Leave the second dropdown on Matches regex.
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4. Paste the regex and apply
Paste the line below into the box and press Apply. Search Console uses RE2 syntax, which is what this pattern is written in.
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5. Read your list
What is left is only the queries that start with a question word — the actual sentences people typed before Google showed them your site. Sort by impressions to see what you are already visible for, and by clicks to see what is already working.
(?i)^(who|what|when|where|why|how|which|can|should|does|do|is|are|will)\b
Want a shorter net? (?i)^(who|what|when|where|why|how)\b keeps only the classic five Ws and how.
What to do with the list
- Take the ten questions with the most impressions and the fewest clicks. Google is showing you for them and people are not clicking — usually because nothing on the page actually answers the question.
- Give each one its own heading on a real page, phrased the way the person typed it.
- Answer it in the first two sentences, then expand underneath.
- Come back in a month with the same filter and compare. The list moves.
Take it with you
The same steps, the regex and the follow-up plan, as a PDF you can keep or hand to whoever writes for you.
Questions about the questions
Do I need a paid tool for this?
No. Google Search Console is free, and the regex filter is built into the Performance report.
Why does the regex start with (?i)?
(?i) makes the pattern case-insensitive, so “How” and “how” both match. Search Console's regex is already case-insensitive by default, so this is belt and braces — it costs nothing and makes the pattern work the same way anywhere else you paste it.
What does \b do at the end?
It is a word boundary. Without it, “whoever” and “however” would match as if they were questions. With it, only the whole word counts.
I get almost no results. Is it broken?
Probably not. Small sites often have few question queries, and Search Console hides queries with very low volume for privacy. Widen the date range to 12 months, and drop the ^ from the start of the pattern so a question word anywhere in the query matches.
Can I do the same thing for pages?
Yes — pick Page instead of Query in the first dropdown and the same Custom (regex) option appears.
One practical play like this, every day
Fynl.io is one portal for your CRM, calendar, quotes, invoices, website and email — and the AI runs on your own Claude or ChatGPT API key, so there is no markup on it.
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