Query groups turn a flat list of thousands of queries into segments you can actually report on. It is the difference between knowing that traffic fell and knowing that it fell in one product line.
The built-in groups
- All queries — everything for which the site appeared in the top 50.
- Uploaded — queries added manually.
- Saved — the special group whose queries get detailed per-query tracking on the statistics page. This is where commercially important phrases belong.
Summary indicators — impressions, clicks, position and CTR — are shown as mean values for the last 7 days, which is worth remembering before treating them as current.
The limits, which shape how you plan
- 500 queries per group, and 1,000 in the Saved group.
- 100 groups per site.
- 10,000 uploaded queries per site, in batches of up to 500 lines as text or a
.txtfile.
These are generous for a normal site and restrictive for a large catalogue, where grouping has to be done by theme rather than by page.
Building groups that earn their keep
Yandex’s own example is grouping a phone retailer’s queries around the word “phone”. In practice the groups that produce useful reports are the ones that match how the business thinks: by product line, by intent (research versus purchase), by brand versus generic, and by region where the site serves several. Groups can also be created directly from a saved filter, which is the fastest route — filter All queries by URL fragment such as /category/, then save the result as a group.
Two operational notes
- A new group shows no statistics immediately; data accumulates over a few days. Building groups the morning of a report is too late.
- Manually added queries appear filtered by “added manually” and can be deleted individually in that view; switching the filter shows the whole group again.
Why bother
Because average position across a site is nearly meaningless, and average position within a coherent group is not. Grouping is what makes the rest of the Efficiency section diagnostic rather than decorative.
Comment nous l'appliquons
We set up three groups on every Yandex engagement before touching anything else: branded, unbranded commercial, and informational. Almost every argument about whether SEO work is producing results is settled by that split, because branded demand moves with marketing spend and drowns everything else in a site-wide average. The 7-day averaging is worth stating in reports too — clients compare the summary with yesterday’s position and conclude the tool is wrong.
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