Embodiments are directed towards determining and tracking metadata for the generation of visualizations of requested data. A user may request data by providing a query that may be employed to search for the requested data. The query may include a plurality of commands, which may be employed in a pipeline to perform the search and to generate a table of the requested data. In some embodiments, each command may be executed to perform an action on a set of data. The execution of a command may generate one or more columns to append and/or insert into the table of requested data. Metadata for each generated column may be determined based on the actions performed by executing the commands. The table of requested data and the column metadata may be employed to generate and display a visualization of at least a portion of the requested data to a user.