About GSC Regex Builder
Google Search Console’s regex filters don’t use the regex syntax most tutorials teach. Search Console runs on RE2, Google’s own engine — and RE2 deliberately doesn’t support lookahead, lookbehind, or backreferences at all, which quietly breaks a lot of regex advice circulating online, including patterns that look like they should work for excluding keywords.
This tool generates GSC-compatible patterns directly — paste in a list of keywords or phrases, and it builds a properly escaped, word-boundary-wrapped pattern that will actually work when pasted into Search Console’s Performance filter.
A worked example: entering “buy now,” “pricing,” and “discount code” generates b(?:buy now|pricing|discount code)b — each term is escaped (so a term containing a literal “?” or “+” doesn’t break the pattern) and wrapped in word boundaries, which prevents an over-broad match like “pricing” accidentally matching inside an unrelated longer word.
Excluding terms in GSC isn’t done with a “not” pattern inside the regex itself, since RE2 has no way to express that — instead, you use that exact same positive pattern, but select “Doesn’t match regex” in Search Console’s own filter dropdown. This tool builds the pattern either way; which dropdown option you pick determines whether it’s an include or exclude filter.
Already have a pattern from somewhere else? The built-in checker scans it for known RE2-incompatible constructs — paste in a classic negative-lookahead attempt like ^(?!.*(brand)).*$ and it flags exactly why that specific pattern will fail in Search Console, before you find out the hard way inside GSC itself.