What Is Average Position in Google Search Console?

How Google numbers a results page

A Google results page is a stack of elements: plain links, a featured snippet, a video carousel, a knowledge panel, an AI Overview. Google assigns positions by walking down the primary column from the top, then down the secondary column, and giving each element that contains at least one link out of Google a single position number. Position 1 is the first such element. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

Three consequences follow from "each element occupies one position":

• A carousel of ten pages at position 2 gives all ten of them position 2. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}
• A knowledge panel in the side column with six links is one position for all six, and it may be numbered 6 or 7 even though it sits at the top of the screen. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}
• Elements with no outbound links, such as a "query refinement" carousel that only triggers a new Google search, do not take a position at all, and ads never do. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

A featured snippet links out to its source, so it typically occupies position 1. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?} An AI Overview occupies one position, and every link inside it is assigned that same position. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

How the average is calculated

The position shown in the Performance report is the topmost position a link to your property or page held, averaged across every search in which it appeared. Google's own example: query one returns your site at positions 2, 4 and 6, counted as 2; query two returns it at 3, 5 and 9, counted as 3; average position is 2.5. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

Two rules shape what you see:

1. Only impressions count. A result that nobody loaded — say your page on the third page of results when users only viewed the first — records no position for that search. In some report views that shows as a dash. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}
2. Topmost wins, per grouping. Grouped by property, the best of all your URLs is recorded. Grouped by page, each URL records its own topmost position. Switching between the two views changes the number, and that difference is the single most useful tell for keyword cannibalization.

Why "position 8.4" can mean position 1 and position 30

Because it is an average, one number can describe very different realities. The example below is constructed to show the mechanism.

All three sites would see roughly "position 8" in the Queries tab. The first is stable. The second depends on a SERP feature that could vanish next week. The third is a ranking flip-flop — two pages taking turns, the Search Console tell for internal keyword cannibalization — and neither page is actually at 8. The fix for that case is consolidation, not on-page work.

The way to tell them apart is to change the grouping. Open the query, switch to the Pages tab, and look at the position per URL and the date chart per URL. Stable single page, stable one number. Two pages alternating, two lines that trade places.

Example: reading position next to impressions

Row two is the quick win: 640 impressions, position 11.6, under one percent CTR. The page already ranks; it is sitting at the top of page two. Row three is not — position 27 is a different piece of work. Row four shows why you should not chase the average for its own sake: position 3.9 on a small query earns less than position 5.8 on a large one. Weight by impressions, always — that is the whole idea behind low-hanging fruit SEO. The Low-Hanging Fruit Finder does that arithmetic for every query in positions 4 to 30 at once.

The thing people get wrong

An improving average position is not automatically good news. Lose the impressions for a big query where you ranked at 40, and your average jumps up because the bad data points left. Clicks did not move. Position is a signal to investigate, never a score to report on its own.

The other common misread is comparing your own search against the report. Your result is one search, shaped by your location, device and history; the report is an average over everyone's. Google says plainly that the two will differ. ^{[1]Google Search Console Help. What are impressions, position, and clicks?}

Position vs rank in a rank tracker

Rank trackers are useful for a shortlist of keywords you care about. Average position is the only one of the two that covers everything you actually rank for, which is why a cannibalization check starts in Search Console, not in a tracker.