average position

Average position used to be one of the headline numbers in a Google Ads account, an estimate of where your ad typically landed on the results page relative to other ads. A position close to 1 meant you were usually showing near the top. A higher number meant you were further down, sometimes below the fold entirely.

Google has since retired the metric from most of its reporting, replacing it with measures like impression share, which describe how often your ad appeared near the top out of all the times it was eligible to show, rather than an averaged rank. The change reflects how much search results pages have changed. A results page today can carry ads, a map pack, a knowledge panel and organic results all competing for the same screen, and a single averaged position number stopped being a useful way to describe visibility inside that mix.

The idea average position was trying to capture, roughly where you show up, is still worth understanding even if the specific metric is mostly gone. It connects to click-through rate and Quality Score, since position, however it is measured now, still affects how often people see and click your ad.

Why it matters to you

If you have run Google Ads for a long time, or worked with someone who reported using average position, you may still see the term in older reports or hear it used out of habit. Knowing what it meant, and that it has been replaced, helps you understand why a current report looks different from one you remember from a few years ago.

The underlying question it was trying to answer, “am I showing up near the top when it matters,” is still the right question to ask. It is just measured differently now, with metrics that better reflect how crowded and varied a results page has become.

How I use it

I do not build reports around average position, since Google has moved away from it and the newer metrics give a clearer picture. I look at impression share instead, particularly top impression share, alongside cost per click and Quality Score, to understand whether an account is genuinely competitive for the searches that matter or losing visibility to a limited budget.

If a client asks specifically about position on the page, I translate the question into the current metrics and explain what changed, rather than trying to reconstruct an old number Google no longer reports cleanly.

What it looks like in practice

You are unlikely to see average position in a report I send today. What you will see instead is impression share broken down by campaign, showing what percentage of eligible searches actually resulted in your ad appearing, and how much of that was near the very top of the page.

If that share is low, the fix is usually one of two things: the budget is capped too tightly to compete for every eligible search, or the Quality Score is weak enough that Google is deprioritizing the ad against competitors willing to pay more for the same position.