Guide 03

Average Position vs Rank: What Search Console's Number Means

How Google calculates average position, why it isn't your 'rank', and how to read it properly.

By Tweeted Ranks Team · · 4 min read

When people talk about rankings they usually mean one number: "we're third for this keyword." Search Console doesn't give you that. It gives you an average position, often with a decimal, like 4.6 or 12.3. The two are related, but treating them as the same thing leads to confusing charts and bad decisions.

Rank: one search, one screen

A rank is what you see when you run a search yourself. You count down the page and find your result in, say, fourth place. That reading is real, but it describes one results page, built for one person in one place on one device at one moment. Someone else searching the same words may see you in second or ninth place. Our guide on why rankings differ for every searcher explains the reasons.

Manual rank is also a matter of what you count. Do you include the map pack? The video row? The box of questions? Different people count differently, and paid rank trackers each have their own rules.

Average position: every impression, averaged

Search Console's number comes from real searches by everyone who saw your site. Google's help documentation describes the calculation roughly like this:

  1. Each time your site appears in a search result, Google notes the topmost position any of your links held on that page. If you appear at 2, 4 and 6 on the same page, that impression counts as position 2.
  2. Those values are then averaged. If you held position 2 for one search and position 3 for another, the average is 2.5.

A position is recorded only when there was an impression. If nobody saw your result, there is no position to average, which is why very deep rankings often don't appear at all.

How Google counts the elements on a page

Each element on the results page takes one position, counted top to bottom. A standard result is one position. A block of results, such as a carousel or a set of images, takes one position as a whole, and every link inside it shares that number. Your page might be the fourth image in an image row that sits at position 3. Search Console records that as position 3.

Ads don't take a position. Rows of suggested searches don't either. On a two-column desktop layout, Google counts down the main column first, then down the side column.

This means average position can look better than the "blue link" rank you'd count by hand. If your page shows up in a video carousel near the top and as an ordinary result at position 8, the carousel appearance wins.

Why the average moves when nothing changed

Average position is a mixture, and mixtures change when their ingredients change. A few common cases:

New queries arrive

Your article starts appearing for 40 loosely related searches at positions 30 to 60. Its strong queries haven't moved, but the property-wide average gets worse, maybe a lot worse. Traffic might even be up.

Old queries leave

A seasonal search fades out of the mix and the average jumps, though nothing improved.

Countries and devices mix

A burst of impressions from a country where you rank poorly drags the number down.

Images and other search types

The Performance report has a search type setting (Web, Image, Video, News). Web is the default. Keep it fixed when you compare periods.

Counting changes

In September 2025 Google stopped supporting a parameter that let automated tools load 100 results at once. Many sites saw desktop impressions fall and average position improve around then, likely because fewer automated rank checks were being recorded as impressions. Nothing about those sites had changed.

Read it one query at a time

The fix is to stop reading the site-wide average and look at specific queries. Add a Query filter for one keyword, choose your main country, and if your audience is mostly mobile, filter to Mobile as well. Now the average describes one kind of search from one kind of searcher. It still moves, but it moves for reasons you can think about.

Do this for every keyword you care about and log the numbers weekly. A line that goes from 14.2 to 11.8 to 9.6 over a month is a real improvement, even if you've never personally seen your page at position 9.6. Nobody has. It's an average.

Property view vs page view

There's one more detail. When you look at queries for the whole site, Search Console uses the topmost position of any of your pages for each impression. When you filter by a single page, it uses that page's own position. So the same query can show a better average at site level than for the page you're watching, if another of your pages sometimes appears above it.

If you're tracking a keyword because you want a specific page to rank for it, filter by both the query and the page.

What a decimal tells you

An average of 1.3 means you're almost always first, with the odd lower appearance. An average of 5.5 might mean you're always around fifth, or half the time second and half the time ninth. Search Console can't tell you which. If you need that detail, look at the Dates tab with the query filter on and see how much the daily values swing. Steady daily values around the average mean a stable ranking. Big swings mean Google is still testing where your page belongs.

Rules of thumb

  • A lower number is better. Position 1 is the top.
  • Compare equal periods with the same filters: same country, same device, same search type.
  • Watch individual queries, not the site-wide figure.
  • Read the average alongside impressions. A better position with far fewer impressions may just mean you've dropped out of the searches where you did badly.
  • Log the numbers yourself. Search Console only keeps 16 months, and a running log with notes is how you tie changes in position to changes you made.

The rank log accepts decimals so you can enter Search Console's figures as they are. Google's explanation of these metrics is on its help page, What are impressions, position, and clicks?

Questions

Is a lower average position better?
Yes. Position 1 is the top of the page, so a falling number means your result is appearing higher. On a chart it helps to flip the axis so that improvement points up, which is what the Tweeted Ranks log does.
Why did my average position get worse when traffic went up?
Usually because your page started appearing for many new queries at low positions. Those extra impressions pull the average down while the clicks from your strong queries keep coming.
Do ads count as a position?
No. According to Google's documentation, ads don't occupy a position in Search Console's count.

Read next