Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Google Analytics 4 is Google’s current analytics platform, which replaced Universal Analytics in 2023. It measures what people do once they reach your site — pages viewed, actions taken, conversions completed — using an event-based model where every interaction is an event, rather than the old session-and-pageview model.

For SEO, GA4 is where you connect organic traffic to behaviour and conversions: segment the "Organic Search" channel, track engaged sessions and key events (conversions), and see which landing pages actually drive signups, not just visits. Link it to Search Console for query data, and define your conversions carefully so organic’s business contribution is visible rather than buried in raw traffic counts.

Senior practitioners work around GA4’s realities — the event model’s learning curve, data thresholding and sampling, and attribution defaults — and often pipe data to BigQuery for unsampled, custom analysis. They build organic-specific reports tied to pipeline, reconcile GA4 against Search Console (which count different things), and treat conversion configuration and attribution model choice as decisions that materially change how SEO’s value appears.