How to Use Google Search Operators: The Plain-English List With Real Examples

Google search operators are short commands that tell Google what to include and what to leave out. Add site: and you search one website. Add quotes and you search for an exact phrase. Add filetype:pdf and you only get PDFs.

They are free and they work in any browser. They solve real jobs, too. Find every page a competitor wrote on a topic. Check which of your pages Google has indexed. Dig up a report that a normal search buries.

This guide lists the operators that work in September 2026, shows real results from searches we ran that day, and marks the ones that are dead.

How to type a search operator

Three rules cover almost every mistake.

1. No space after the colon. site:example.com works. site: example.com does not.
2. Operators go anywhere in the query. site:example.com pricing and pricing site:example.com return the same thing.
3. OR must be capitals. Lowercase or is just a word.

You can use operators in the normal search box. Google’s Advanced Search page (google.com/advanced_search) fills in the same operators through a form if you prefer that.

The operators Google documents

These seven are listed in Google’s own help pages. They are stable and you can rely on them.

Real examples

We ran these through a SERP API on September 6, 2026, US desktop, so you can see what to expect.

site:serplify.io returned only pages on our own domain and subdomains: the privacy policy, the status page, the docs, the SERP API page, and the blog. That is the fastest way to see what Google has indexed for any site. The count Google gives is an estimate, so use Search Console for the real number.

"seo checklist" filetype:pdf returned about 1,360 results, every one a PDF. The top ten included checklists from a university, a HubSpot-hosted document, and a local SEO group. This is how researchers find reports and slide decks that never rank as web pages.

"rank tracker" after:2026-06-01 returned only pages Google dated from June 2026 onward, about 51,600 of them. Use it to see what has been published on a topic recently, or to check whether a competitor’s page is new.

best running shoes -nike -adidas dropped both brands from the first page. The results shifted to guides from running clubs and smaller shoe makers.

The operators that work but are not documented

Google does not list these in its help pages, but they work as of September 2026. Expect slightly looser results than the documented set.

One real example from our test: intitle:"serp api" -serpapi returned about 5,900 pages with “SERP API” in the title and no mention of the company SerpApi. The top results were a GitHub project, two comparison articles, and a Reddit thread. That is a content gap search in one line.

The operators that no longer work

If you learned these from an older guide, stop using them. They either return normal results or an error.

What SEO teams actually use operators for

Here are the searches that come up week after week.

Check what is indexed. site:yourdomain.com shows a sample of indexed pages. Add a word to see which page Google prefers for a topic: site:yourdomain.com pricing. If a page you expect is missing, read why your website is not showing up on Google.

Find duplicate or thin pages. site:yourdomain.com intitle:"tag" or site:yourdomain.com inurl:page/ often turns up archive and pagination pages you forgot were indexed.

Find a competitor’s content on a topic. site:competitor.com "rank tracking" lists every page they wrote about it. Add after:2026-01-01 to see only the new ones.

Find content gaps. intitle:"how to" "serp features" -site:yourdomain.com shows who has written the how-to you have not.

Find guest post and resource pages. "write for us" "seo" or intitle:"resources" inurl:links "seo" are the classic outreach searches. They are heavily used, so expect crowded results.

Find PDFs and decks. filetype:pdf "state of seo" 2026 finds reports that never rank as web pages.

Check a phrase. Put a sentence from your page in quotes. If other sites show it, the text was copied, one way or the other.

Operators and SERP tools

Operators work in rank trackers and SERP APIs too, because those tools send the query to Google the same way you do. Two things to know.

First, results for operator queries are less stable than normal searches. Google treats them as low-priority and sometimes trims the result count. Run the same site: query twice and you may see different totals.

Second, some providers charge more for them. DataForSEO multiplies its base price by five for queries with search operators. Serplify charges the same $0.005 per successful SERP either way. If you plan to run thousands of site: or intitle: checks, read how to scrape Google search results for what it takes to do that without getting blocked.

Quick recap

• Type operators with no space after the colon, and write OR in capitals.
• Quotes, minus, site:, filetype:, before:, after:, and OR are documented and reliable.
• intitle:, inurl:, intext:, AROUND(n), and the wildcard still work but are looser.
• +, ~, link:, info:, and cache: are gone.
• Use them for index checks, content gaps, competitor research, and finding documents. Use Search Console for real page counts.