Search operators

How do search operators work?

An operator sits directly before the search term with no space between them. Google’s help page states that site:nytimes.com works and site: nytimes.com does not. The operators on that page are quotation marks for an exact phrase, site:, the minus sign to exclude a word, before: and after: for dates, and filetype:.

Google’s documentation for site debugging in Search Central covers four operators, site:, filetype:, imagesize: and src:. The last two apply to image search only. Others, such as intitle: and inurl:, are widely used by SEOs but are not listed on the Google pages above.

Limits for SEO work

Google writes that search operators are bound by indexing and retrieval limits and that the URL Inspection tool in Search Console is more reliable for debugging. A site: query is a quick check of whether a domain has pages in the index. The number of results is only a rough hint (assessment).

Example

site:example.com                      results from this domain only
site:example.com filetype:pdf         PDF files on this domain
"canonical tag" -wordpress            exact phrase, excluding results with "wordpress"
site:example.com after:2026-01-01     pages updated after this date

FAQ

Do Google search operators still work? The operators in Google’s help page are documented. Those outside the documentation can change without notice (assessment).

Does the space after the colon matter? Yes. With a space, Google does not treat the operator as one.

Last updated: October 7, 2026