How to read Search Console performance data

The four metrics

The Performance report in Google Search Console shows how your site appears in Google Search through four metrics: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position. Each is simple to define but easy to misread, because the totals blend many queries, pages and searchers.

Clicks

The number of clicks from Google Search results that took a user to your site.

Impressions

The number of times a link to your site appeared in results a user loaded, generally even if they did not scroll down to it.

CTR

Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.

Average position

Your site's topmost position in each search where it appeared, averaged across those impressions. Position 1 is the top. If two of your pages show for one search, only the higher one counts.

Why averages mislead

A page can rank first for its brand name and fortieth for a broad term, and the average shows something in between that matches neither. A falling average position can even be good news: if you start appearing for many new queries at low positions, the average drops while clicks rise.

CTR is blended the same way. It varies with position, with the type of result, and with what else is on the page, such as ads, maps or AI Overviews. Compare CTR only between similar queries at similar positions.

Filter before you conclude

Use the dimension tabs and filters to break the totals apart:

• Query: what people searched.
• Page: which URL appeared.
• Country: where the searcher was.
• Device: desktop, mobile or tablet.
• Search appearance: result types such as rich results or videos.
• Search type: web, image, video or news.
• Date: compare like-for-like periods, such as this month against the same month last year.

Some data is withheld or delayed. Very rare queries are left out of the query table to protect user privacy, so totals can be higher than the sum of the rows. Data arrives with a delay of a couple of days, and the report keeps 16 months of history.

Find pages close to winning clicks

One practical use of the report is finding pages that Google already shows but that rarely get clicked.

1. Set the date range to the last three months and turn on all four metrics.
2. Open the Queries or Pages tab and filter the table to an average position between about 5 and 15.
3. Sort by impressions, highest first, and look for rows with many impressions but few clicks.
4. Check each query and page together: does the page answer what that query is asking?
5. Rewrite the title and meta description so the result clearly matches the search, strengthen the content where it falls short, and add internal links from related pages.
6. Recheck the same query and page after a few weeks, comparing equal date ranges.