The GSC performance report: clicks, impressions, CTR and position without fooling yourself

The GSC performance report shows four numbers for your site in Google Search: clicks (how often people clicked through to your site), impressions (how often your site appeared), CTR (clicks divided by impressions) and average position (the average of your highest result each time you appeared).¹ The first three mean what they say. The fourth is the one that fools people, and how you compare and filter the other three decides whether the report tells you the truth.

This is part 3 of our series on Google Search Console. If you don’t have GSC yet, see part 1: What Is GSC? and part 2: Set up GSC in 15 minutes.

The four numbers, in Google’s words

• Clicks: the number of times someone clicked your site from Google’s search results.¹ This is the one that pays the bills.
• Impressions: how many times your site appeared in the results.¹ Google counts a link the person saw, or could have seen: on a normal results page, they didn’t need to scroll down to it.²
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions.¹ It tells you how convincing your result is to the people who saw it.
• Average position: the average position of the topmost result from your site.¹ Position 1 is the top.²

One detail changes the totals: when you look at searches, countries, devices or dates, Google counts by site; when you look at pages, it counts by page.¹ If two of your pages appear for the same search, that is one impression for the site but one for each page, so the two views won’t match. Both are right.

Why average position misleads

For each search where you appeared, Google takes your highest result. If your site showed at positions 2, 4 and 6 for one search, that counts as 2. Then it averages. Google’s own example: a search at 2 and another at 3 give an average of 2.5.²

That is a fair number for one search on one page. Across a whole site it hides more than it shows:

• It mixes searches you lead with searches you barely touch. On our own site, from 1 to 25 October, desktop searches averaged position 16.9 and mobile 14.5. Behind those averages are searches where we sat near the top of page one and others where we appeared around position 50 or lower: one Spanish search about free website audits showed us 25 times at an average position of 56, with no clicks. Neither average describes any real search.
• It can get worse while the business gets better. When your site starts appearing for new searches, it usually enters low. Those new impressions pull the average down even as clicks go up.
• It can get better while the business gets worse. Drop out of the long tail and the average rises, with fewer people seeing you.

So never read average position alone. Read it for one search or one page at a time, and always next to clicks.

Compare the right dates

The date filter lets you compare two periods, and the table then shows a difference column.³ Two habits keep the comparison honest:

• Compare with the same period last year when your business has seasons, which most do. GSC keeps 16 months, enough for one year back.⁴
• Compare whole weeks or months. Google notes that grouping by week or month neutralizes the day-of-the-week effect.³ Monday against Sunday tells you nothing.

Ignore the last day or two: the newest data can be preliminary, shown as a dotted line, and may still change.¹ Data usually arrives two to three days late.⁵

Filter by search, page, country and device

The report has tabs for searches, pages, countries, devices, search appearance and dates, and a filter bar to narrow everything to one of them.¹ ³ The filters you will use most:

• Page: one service or product page, to see which searches bring people to it.
• Country: where the search came from.⁶ Useful if you sell in one market and get traffic from many.
• Device: desktop, mobile or tablet.⁶ A page that does well on desktop and poorly on mobile usually has a mobile problem.
• Search (query): containing or not containing a word, or a list of words with a regular expression.³

One warning: filtering by search drops the rare searches Google hides for privacy, so filtered totals can be lower than the unfiltered total, and “containing” plus “not containing” may not add up to it.³ ⁵

Separate your brand from everything else

People who search your company’s name already know you. Their clicks say little about whether Google sends you new customers. Split them:

• GSC has a branded and non-branded queries filter that does this for you. It isn’t available for sites with few impressions, and Google warns that some searches may be classified wrongly.⁶
• If you don’t have it, filter by search “not containing” your brand name. For several spellings, use a regular expression with the variants separated by a vertical bar, for example (acme|acmé|acme inc); matching ignores capitals.³

Non-brand clicks are the number that shows whether your site is earning new customers from Google.

What to look at every week

Ten minutes, in this order:

1. Non-brand clicks for the last full four weeks, against the same weeks last year. Up, down or flat?
2. Your money pages: filter by each service or product page and check its clicks against last year.
3. Searches with many impressions and a low CTR. Google already shows you; the title or description is not convincing. Often a one-line fix.
4. Any big change by country or device, which usually points to one cause you can find.

Average position appears only as a supporting number, for one search or one page.

Where to go next

If you want this read for you, our free website audit checks what Google can see from the outside. The deep audit reads your own GSC data, with restricted access only, and turns these four numbers into a list of searches and pages worth money, in priority order.

Notes. ¹ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup”. ² Google, “What are impressions, position, and clicks?”. ³ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Advanced filtering and comparison”. ⁴ Google, “Debug Google Search traffic drops” (the 16-month date range). ⁵ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Troubleshooting data discrepancies”. ⁶ Google, “Performance report (Search results): Dimensions and data groupings”. Read on 26 October 2026. Our own figures come from our Search Console, 1 to 25 October 2026.