What Is the Content Drilldown Report in Google Analytics? (2026 Guide)

If you learned Google Analytics before 2023, Content Drilldown was probably one of the three or four reports you actually opened. It answered a question no other report answered cleanly: not "which page got traffic", but "which section of the site got traffic".

That report no longer exists. It belonged to Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data in 2023, and Google Analytics 4 shipped without an equivalent. The dimensions that made it work were not carried across either.

The underlying question is still a good one, though, and it is still answerable in GA4 — just through a different mechanism, and one that rewards a small amount of setup. This guide covers what the report did, why it went, and the three realistic ways to get the same view back.

What Is the Content Drilldown Report in Google Analytics?

Content Drilldown was a Universal Analytics report that grouped pageviews by URL folder instead of by individual page. It sat under Behaviour, then Site Content, then Content Drilldown, and it let you click into a folder to expand the pages inside it.

Rather than a flat list of every URL on the site, you saw the top level of your URL structure first: /blog/, /products/, /docs/, /pricing/. Clicking a folder drilled one level deeper, which is where the report got its name.

The metrics alongside each folder were the standard content set of the era, including pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, bounce rate and exit percentage. The value was not the metrics themselves but the aggregation, because it turned a list of thousands of URLs into a handful of meaningful sections.

For any site with a deliberate URL structure, that aggregation was the fastest way to see where attention actually went. A blog with four hundred posts shows up as four hundred forgettable rows in an all-pages report and as one decisive row in Content Drilldown.

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How Content Drilldown Actually Worked

The report was powered by a set of Universal Analytics dimensions called Page path level 1 through Page path level 4. Those dimensions split each URL at its slashes and exposed each segment separately.

Splitting the URL into levels

For a URL like /blog/seo/keyword-research/, level 1 was /blog/, level 2 was /blog/seo/ and level 3 was /blog/seo/keyword-research/. Content Drilldown simply displayed level 1 first and stepped down a level with each click.

Because the split was purely mechanical, the report was only as useful as the URL structure underneath it. Sites with a flat structure, where everything lived at the root, got a single meaningless row. Sites with a considered hierarchy got something close to a content audit on demand.

Why it earned its place in the workflow

Three things made it a habit rather than a curiosity. It needed no configuration at all, it worked retroactively across all historical data, and it matched the way people already thought about their own sites.

That last point is the one worth holding onto. Nobody describes their site as a list of URLs. They describe it as a blog, a documentation area, a product catalogue and a few landing pages. Content Drilldown was the only standard report that spoke that language.

It was also a reporting shortcut for people who did not own the site. An agency, a new hire or an executive could open one report and understand the shape of a site in under a minute, without needing anyone to explain the URL conventions first.

The flip side is that it flattered sites with tidy URLs and punished everyone else, which is part of why Google was willing to let it go.

Why GA4 Does Not Have Content Drilldown

Universal Analytics stopped processing new data for standard properties on 1 July 2023, and the reporting interface was retired afterwards. Anything that depended on it went with it, Content Drilldown included.

GA4 is not a redesign of Universal Analytics but a different measurement model. It is built on events rather than sessions and pageviews, and its reporting surface is deliberately smaller, with the expectation that anything specialised gets built in Explorations rather than shipped as a fixed report.

The specific reason Content Drilldown could not simply be ported is that GA4 does not expose the page path level dimensions. It has Page path and screen class, Page title and screen class, Page location, and Landing page, but nothing that splits a path at its slashes for you.

So the gap is real rather than a matter of finding the right menu. What GA4 offers instead is a first-class way to define your own sections, which for most sites is better than the mechanical split ever was.

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Does the Report Still Exist Anywhere?

It is worth being direct about this, because a lot of older tutorials are still indexed and still describe the menu path as though you could follow it today. You cannot. There is no hidden Content Drilldown in GA4, no legacy toggle and no beta that restores it.

Google Analytics 360, the paid tier, does not have it either. The difference between the free and paid tiers of GA4 is about data limits, sampling, service levels and BigQuery export terms, not about which reports appear in the menu.

Third-party analytics platforms often do include a folder or section view, and some market it explicitly as a Content Drilldown replacement. That is a real option, but it means running a second analytics tool alongside GA4, and it will only cover data from the day you installed it, which is the same starting-from-zero problem as the GA4 approach.

How to Rebuild Content Drilldown in GA4

The closest replacement is the built-in Content group dimension. GA4 populates it from a content_group parameter you send with your page_view events, which means you decide what the groups are rather than inheriting whatever your URLs happen to look like.

1. Decide on your groups first, on paper. Blog, product, documentation, pricing, support. Keep the list short enough to fit on one screen, because the whole point is aggregation.
2. Send a content_group parameter with every page_view event. In Google Tag Manager this is a field on the GA4 configuration or event tag; in gtag.js it is a parameter on the config or event call.
3. Derive the value from the URL path where you can, so it stays correct as you publish more pages. A simple rule that maps the first path segment to a group name covers most sites.
4. Wait for data. Content group is not retroactive, so it only describes traffic that arrived after you implemented it. This is the one genuine cost of the approach.
5. Report on it in the Pages and screens report by switching the dimension to Content group, or build a Free form exploration with Content group as the row dimension.

Once it is running, the result is closer to what people wanted from Content Drilldown than Content Drilldown was. Groups can cross folders, so a campaign landing page living at the root can sit in the same group as the /campaigns/ directory, which the mechanical path split could never do.

The obvious drawback is that it requires implementation work and it starts from zero. If you need an answer about last quarter, this is not the route.

Getting the Same View Without Any Setup

If you cannot wait for new data or cannot change the tagging, there are two workarounds that use what GA4 already collects.

Filter the Pages and screens report

Open Engagement, then Pages and screens, and add a filter or search term on Page path and screen class containing the folder you care about, such as /blog/. The rows narrow to that section and the totals line gives you the section total.

This works on historical data and takes about fifteen seconds. The limitation is that you are examining one folder at a time rather than comparing all of them side by side, so it answers "how did the blog do" but not "which section did best".

Use comparisons to see sections side by side

GA4 comparisons let you define several audiences or condition sets and view them together. Building one comparison per section, each filtered on a page path fragment, gets you a genuine side-by-side view without touching your tags.

Comparisons are capped at a handful at once, so this suits a site with four or five meaningful sections rather than a sprawling one. For most sites that is enough.

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Rebuilding It Outside GA4 Entirely

Two options sit outside the GA4 interface and both handle the folder split properly, because both let you write an expression.

Looker Studio, connected to your GA4 property, supports calculated fields. A regular expression that extracts the first path segment from the page path gives you exactly the Content Drilldown level 1 dimension, applied retroactively to all the data in the property. Add a second calculated field for level 2 and you have the drill behaviour as well.

This is the pragmatic answer for most people. It needs no tagging changes, works on historical data, and produces something you can share as a dashboard rather than a report someone has to remember to filter correctly.

GA4's BigQuery export is the thorough version. It is available on standard properties at no licence cost, and once events are landing in BigQuery you can split paths, group them and aggregate them with SQL however you like. It requires a Google Cloud project and someone comfortable writing queries, and it only covers data from the date you enabled the export onwards.

Limitations Worth Knowing About

Every route to this answer has an edge, and knowing them up front saves an argument later.

Content group is not retroactive. Whatever you implement today describes tomorrow's traffic only, and there is no way to backfill it.

Path-based grouping breaks on inconsistent URL structures. Trailing slashes, query strings, uppercase characters and multiple paths serving the same content all create separate rows that look like separate pages. This affected Content Drilldown in Universal Analytics too, and it still affects any regular expression you write in Looker Studio.

Your historical Universal Analytics data is gone. Google deleted Universal Analytics properties and their data after the sunset, so exports taken before that point are the only remaining source. If you did not take one, comparisons against the Content Drilldown era are not available at any price.

Metric definitions changed between the two versions of Google Analytics. Bounce rate, time on page and even pageviews are not defined identically in GA4, so a section total from a rebuilt GA4 view is not directly comparable to the same section in an old Universal Analytics screenshot.

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Content Drilldown vs All Pages vs Landing Pages

These three reports answered different questions and got confused with each other constantly, which is worth untangling because the same confusion carries into GA4.

All Pages, now roughly the Pages and screens report, is a flat list of individual URLs ranked by traffic. It answers which single pages perform, and it is the right report when you want to find your top ten posts.

Landing Pages counts only the pages where sessions began. It answers which pages bring people in from outside, which is a different and often more useful question for search work, because a page can be heavily viewed internally while attracting nothing from Google.

Content Drilldown answered neither of those. It answered which parts of the site hold attention, at a level of abstraction above individual pages. Rebuilding it is worth the effort precisely because nothing else covers that ground.

In practice the three work together. Content group tells you the blog is carrying the site, Landing page tells you which posts are the entry points, and Pages and screens tells you which individual URLs to update first.

Which Route Should You Pick?

Choosing between the options comes down to whether you need history, whether you can change the tagging, and how often you will look at the answer:

• Need it once, for one section, right now: filter the Pages and screens report.
• Need to compare four or five sections on historical data: build calculated fields in Looker Studio.
• Need it as a permanent part of standard reporting: implement the content_group parameter.
• Need groups that do not follow the URL structure at all: content_group is the only option that can do this.
• Need full control and have SQL skills available: use the BigQuery export.

Most teams end up running two of these, using Looker Studio to cover the past while content_group builds up a clean record going forward.

Final Thoughts

Content Drilldown is not coming back, and chasing a menu item in GA4 that reproduces it exactly is time wasted. The question it answered is still worth answering, and there are three honest routes to it.

If you want the answer today on historical data, build calculated fields in Looker Studio. If you want it properly and permanently, implement the content_group parameter and accept that it starts from zero. If you just need one section's numbers quickly, filter the Pages and screens report and move on.

The broader lesson from the Universal Analytics migration is that GA4 rewards deciding what you want to measure rather than browsing what happens to be on offer. If you are still translating old metrics into new ones, our explanation of pages per session in Google Analytics covers another metric that did not survive the move intact.