I have been asked numerous times about Google Search Console average position charts and why they are not a solid line showing a continuous ranking pattern.
Where do I find Google Search Console average position?
To see your Google Search Console average position, go to Google Search Console and in the left sidebar, click on "Performance." This will bring up a chart of your site's performance over the past 3 months. By default, it shows a blue line for total clicks to your site and a purple line for total impressions for your website. To see the orange line for "average position," click on the box in the upper right titled "Average position."
See the chart below with the orange line bouncing up and down, and the broken gaps in the line. That orange line charts of your website's average position. Or you can click on one of the queries below to see the average position for that specific query. Or you can click on "Pages" below and see the average position for that page.
Google defines average position like this:
- Average Position: The average ranking of your website URLs for the query or queries. For example, if your site's URL appeared at position 3 for one query and position 7 for another query, the average position would be 5 ((3+7)/2).
What is Google Search Console average position?
Google Search Console average position is not the same thing as ranking or even average ranking. On the page level, Google is averaging together the position for multiple keywords related to a given page, so it's not a very reliable metric.
On the keyword (or query) level, it will be an average of how that query ranked in Google during multiple different impressions. But since sometimes a query doesn't rank in Google at all, those non-ranking incidents wouldn't be averaged in.
So Why the Gaps in the Google Search Console average position?
If your website repeatedly disappears and reappears from the average position chart, this may be a bit maddening. Why would that happen?
Actually, this is a common behavior in GSC, particularly for queries that are not ranking very high. What you're seeing in the chart is that some days people search for that query and somebody will scroll all the way to page 4 or 5 to see your site listed as a Google impression. But somedays nobody scrolls down through Google that far for that search query, and then there is no data for that date.