Google Search Operators: The Ones That Still Work, the Ones Google Retired, and Seven SEO Jobs They Do Free

Google's own list is short, and shorter than the cheat sheets

Google's Search Help page on refining web searches documents exactly six operators as of October 2026: quotation marks, site:, the minus sign, before:, after: and filetype:. Its Search Central overview of search operators adds two that only work in Google Images, imagesize: and src:, and frames all of them as debugging aids for site owners.

Everything else on the long lists is folklore, history or a guess. Some of it still works because nobody at Google has turned it off. Some of it was retired years ago and lives on in blog posts that rank for "Google search operators" precisely because nobody updates them. One rule from the help page saves the most frustration: no space after the colon. site:example.com works; site: example.com does not.

Every operator worth knowing, and its status as of October 2026

Operators combine. Most of the useful SEO searches below are three of them stacked: a phrase in quotes, a site: limit and a minus sign to remove your own domain. If a combination returns nothing, drop one operator at a time until results come back; that shows you which part Google refused.

cache: and related: are gone, and what to use instead

Google's documentation changelog records both removals in its own words. On July 18, 2023 it removed related: from the operator documentation "as it's no longer supported." On September 24, 2024 it removed the cache: documentation because "the cache: search operator no longer works in Google Search." When we ran related:bbb.org in October 2026, Google simply returned pages from bbb.org itself, not similar sites. A cache: search returned no results at all.

Each did a job that still needs doing, and each job has a better tool now.

• To see what Google sees on a page: use URL Inspection in Search Console, which shows the crawled and rendered version of your own URLs. Our Google Search Console guide walks through it.
• To see an old version of any page: the Internet Archive announced in September 2024 that Google's About this result panel links to the Wayback Machine copy of a site, except where owners opted out. Or go to the Wayback Machine directly.
• To find sites similar to a competitor: search the services you share with the city name, and read who ranks. Our competitor analysis work does this at scale.
• To check whether a page is indexed: URL Inspection again. A site: search is a rough spot check, not a verdict.

How to search a website for keywords with site:

The single most useful operator is site: plus a word. site:example.com refund searches only that domain, subdomains included, for pages about refunds. Narrow it to a folder with a URL prefix, such as site:https://example.com/blog/ refund. Put the word in quotes when you need that exact wording rather than Google's guess at related terms.

Google's site: operator documentation adds two caveats that cheat sheets skip. A site: search doesn't necessarily return every indexed URL under that prefix. And a site: search with no other words doesn't rank the results; past shortest URLs first, the order is described as relatively random. Do not read meaning into which page appears third.

1. 1

   Find every page that mentions a service

   site:yourdomain.com "water heater" shows the pages Google has stored that use the phrase. Useful before a rewrite, so the old page and the new one do not end up competing.

2. 2

   Find stale prices and old details

   site:yourdomain.com "2023" or the old street address. Outdated pages are also what AI answers sometimes repeat, as our page on AI citing old information explains.

3. 3

   Find forgotten PDFs

   site:yourdomain.com filetype:pdf turns up price sheets and brochures that went out of date years ago and still rank.

4. 4

   Check for injected spam

   Google's own example: site:example.com with spam words such as casino or pharmacy names. Unfamiliar pages on your domain are a sign of a hack; malware removal comes before any SEO.

Seven SEO jobs the search box does for free

None of this needs software. It needs a habit: one session a month, the same searches, notes in a spreadsheet. When the list of mentions grows long enough to manage, the link building section covers what to do with it.

Why operators tell small lies

Google's overview says it outright: search operators are bound by indexing and retrieval limits, so the URL Inspection tool is more reliable for debugging. Operators show a sample of the index, filtered through the same systems that decide ordinary results. Expect gaps.

• Quotes match more than visible text. Google's 2022 post on quoted searches says matches can come from meta descriptions, image alt text, URLs and content behind a click, and that some punctuation counts as a space.
• Quotes do not apply to map results. The same post says local listings shown with a map are not restricted by quotes.
• Undocumented operators get treated as hints. In our October 2026 tests, run by hand in a browser, Google labeled inurl: as "Missing" under some results while still returning URLs that matched, and a search combining a quoted intitle: phrase with inurl: came back "No results found" before showing results with the quotes dropped.
• Pages change after crawling. A quoted phrase can match a page that no longer contains it, because Google matched the version it last stored.
• A site: count is not an index count. For how many pages Google keeps, read the Page indexing report, as our technical SEO checklist does.

Treat any operator result as a lead to check, never as proof. That rule alone protects you from half the alarming screenshots that circulate in SEO forums.

Bing publishes the longer list

Microsoft documents its advanced search keywords more generously than Google does. Bing lists site:, filetype:, ext:, intitle:, inbody:, inanchor:, contains: for pages that link to a file type, ip: for sites on one server, language:, loc:, feed: and url:, which checks whether an address is in Bing's index. The same no-space-after-the-colon rule applies.

That matters beyond Bing's own share of searches, because Microsoft Copilot grounds its answers in web results. If a page is missing from Bing, url: tells you in one search, and our page on ranking on Google but missing from AI answers covers the repair.

When a search box stops being the right tool

Operators answer small questions quickly: is this phrase anywhere on my site, who mentioned us this month, did someone copy this page. They are poor at big questions such as how many pages Google dropped, which links matter or why rankings fell. Those need Search Console, a crawler and judgment. The SEO guide sets out the order to work in, and our roundup of free SEO tools covers the next rung up.

If you would rather not run any of it yourself, our free site audit checks speed signals, SEO, mobile, security and content and emails a report with fixes. The monthly mention searches, link requests and cleanup are part of what DataCram's SEO service does for clients, with no long contract.