Glossary /Measurement
Average Position
The mean ranking of a site’s listings across the queries it appeared for, and the most easily misread metric in search reporting.
Average position is exactly what it says: the mean of the positions a site’s listings held across impressions. Its weakness is that it averages across queries of wildly different value, so the number can move for reasons that have nothing to do with the pages anyone cares about.
It moves in counter-intuitive directions. Starting to rank at position 60 for a hundred new queries drags the average down while the site is unambiguously doing better; losing a swathe of low-value rankings pushes it up while nothing improves. A falling average is not, on its own, bad news.
It is worth watching per query or per page, where it means something concrete, and worth ignoring at site level. Position also varies by device, location and personalisation, so a single reported figure is a compression of a distribution rather than a fact.