How to Find Organic Search Traffic in Google Analytics

Want to see how many people find your website through a Google search? Google Analytics has the answer, but finding that specific data in GA4 can feel like a maze. This guide will walk you through exactly where to find your organic search traffic, what it means, and how you can use that information to improve your SEO and content strategy.

Why Organic Search Traffic Is Worth Your Attention

Before diving into the "how," it's helpful to remember the "why." Your organic search traffic is one of the most important indicators of your website's health and relevance. It represents visitors who found you by typing a query into a search engine like Google and clicking on a non-paid, natural search result. These visitors are often highly motivated because they're actively searching for a solution, answer, or product that you might offer.

Tracking this traffic helps you understand:

• SEO Effectiveness: Are your efforts to rank for specific keywords actually working? A steady increase in organic traffic is a strong sign that they are.
• Content Performance: Which blog posts, landing pages, or product pages are resonating most with search engine users? This data tells you what to create more of.
• Audience Intent: While GA4 has made keyword data a bit harder to get, you can see which pages are drawing visitors, giving you powerful clues about what your audience is looking for.
• Conversion Impact: How many of these organic visitors are signing up for your newsletter, filling out a contact form, or making a purchase? This connects your SEO strategy directly to business results.

Finding Your Data in GA4 (It's Different Than You Remember)

If you're used to the old Universal Analytics (UA), you probably remember a simple "Audience > All Traffic > Channels" report where organic search was clearly listed. Google Analytics 4 reorganized everything, moving away from a session-based model to an event-based one. This makes GA4 more powerful but also means your old workflows won't work the same way.

In GA4, traffic sources are categorized into "channel groups." The main one you'll be working with is the Session default channel group, which automatically buckets your traffic into categories like Organic Search, Direct, Paid Search, and Social. Your main task is to learn how to access and filter reports based on this channel group.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Organic Traffic in GA4

The primary place you'll find this information is in the built-in acquisition reports. Think of this as your new home base for understanding where visitors come from.

The Main Hub: The Traffic Acquisition Report

This is the most direct way to see a breakdown of all your traffic sources, including organic search. Follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics 4 property.
2. On the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports (it looks like a small bar chart icon).
3. Under the Life cycle collection, click on Acquisition.
4. In the dropdown, select the Traffic acquisition report.

You'll now see a table that lists your traffic sources grouped by the Session default channel group. You should see a row labeled "Organic Search" in this table. This row shows you the total sessions, users, engagement rate, conversions, and more, specifically for visitors who arrived from search engines organically.

To see only organic search data, you can use the filter bar at the top of the report:

1. Above the chart, click "Add filter."
2. In the "Build filter" panel that appears on the right, set the conditions:
3. Click Apply.

The entire report — both the chart at the top and the table below — will now be filtered to show data exclusively from organic search.

Focusing on Your Content: The Pages and Screens Report

Knowing how many people come from search is good, but knowing where they land is even better. You can see your top-performing pages for organic search by combining the channel group with a landing page dimension.

There are a couple of ways to do this, but the easiest is by adding a secondary dimension to your Traffic Acquisition report.

1. Go to the Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report as described above.
2. In the data table, click the small blue "+" icon next to the primary dimension (which is "Session default channel group").
3. From the dropdown menu that appears, search for and select Landing page + query string under the "Page / screen" section.

Now, your table will show each channel group broken down by the first page a user landed on during their session. Find the "Organic Search" section and you'll see a list of your website's top entry pages for SEO traffic. This tells you which pages are your SEO heavy hitters.

Beyond Just Visits: Key Metrics to Analyze for Organic Traffic

Once you've isolated your organic traffic, you need to know what you're looking at. The columns in your GA4 reports contain a wealth of valuable information. Here are a few of the most important metrics to pay attention to:

• Users: This tells you the number of unique individuals who visited your site from organic search. It’s your core measure of audience size.
• Sessions: This counts the total number of visits. One user can have multiple sessions. This metric is great for understanding the overall volume of traffic.
• Engaged sessions: This is GA4's replacement for metrics like "bounce rate." A session is counted as engaged if the visitor stayed on the page for more than 10 seconds (you can adjust this), had a conversion event, or viewed at least two pages. It’s a much better indicator of visitor interest than the old bounce rate.
• Engagement rate: Simply put, this is the percentage of sessions that were engaged. A higher engagement rate from organic traffic often means your content is a good match for what users were searching for.
• Event count & Conversions: This is arguably the most important data. Make sure you have conversion events set up (like 'generate_lead' or 'purchase'). This column shows how many times organic visitors completed a valuable action on your site. Don't just chase traffic, chase traffic that converts.

Going a Step Further: Using Explorations for Deeper Analysis

The standard reports are excellent for getting a quick overview, but for true analysis, you’ll want to get comfortable with Explore. The Explore section lets you build custom reports from scratch, giving you more flexibility to slice and dice your data.

Here’s a quick example of how to build a simple free-form report showing your top organic landing pages and their conversion rates:

1. In the left-hand navigation, click Explore.
2. Start a new exploration by clicking on the Free form blank template.
3. Name your exploration: Give it a clear name like "Organic Landing Page Performance."
4. On the left panel, under "Variables," you need to import the dimensions and metrics you want to use. Click the "+" icons next to "Dimensions" and "Metrics."
5. Now, drag and drop these variables into the "Tab Settings" panel:

Presto! The panel on the right will now show a clean table of your top organic landing pages, sorted by the number of sessions they received, along with the number of conversions driven by those pages. This kind of custom report gives you a focused view that you can save and come back to anytime.

Final Thoughts

Finding your organic search traffic in Google Analytics 4 is just a matter of knowing where to look and what filters to apply. Using the Traffic Acquisition report and adding relevant dimensions like landing pages helps you move beyond basic traffic numbers and understand exactly how your SEO and content strategy are performing.

While understanding these steps is valuable, we know that digging through menus, setting up custom reports, and adding filters can take time away from actually making decisions. That's why we built Graphed. Instead of navigating the GA4 interface, you can simply ask a question like, "Show me my top 10 organic landing pages by conversions this month," and instantly see the data you need in a clean, real-time dashboard. We connect directly to your data sources so you can get straight to the insights without the manual setup.