Average Position

Average position was a Google Ads metric that reported the typical rank order of your ad relative to other ads in the auction — first, second, third, and so on. It was one of the most quoted numbers in search advertising for years, and one of the most misunderstood. The crucial point, then and now, is that average position never described where your ad physically appeared on the page. A position of 1.5 did not mean your ad usually sat at the top of the results; it meant that, among the ads shown, yours ranked about first or second. Because ads can appear above the organic results or below them, a strong rank among ads could still place you at the bottom of the page. That gap between rank order and page location was the flaw that eventually retired the metric.

Google sunset average position in 2019. The company announced the change in August 2019 and turned the metric off starting the week of September 30, 2019. The reasoning was that average position had grown misleading as the results page evolved and as Google changed the rules for where ads could show. Advertisers optimizing toward a low average-position number were chasing rank without knowing whether that rank actually put them in a valuable spot on the page. So the metric is now genuinely dead in Google Ads — you cannot pull it in a current report — and any strategy, script, or automated rule that still references it is broken. It survives only as a term people remember and, too often, still ask for by name.

Google replaced average position with location-based metrics that describe where ads actually appear, not merely how they rank. The two core replacements are absolute top impression rate — the share of your impressions shown in the very first ad slot above the organic results — and top impression rate, the share shown anywhere in the block of ads above organic. These answer the real question average position only pretended to answer: not what number your ad ranked, but whether it landed in the premium space at the top of the page. Alongside them, Google offers impression-share versions — search top impression share and search absolute top impression share — plus the lost-share metrics that attribute missed top placements to budget or rank. Together these give a far truer picture of prominence.

The shift changes how you should think and talk. Under average position, the instinct was to chase a lower number, as if 1.2 were self-evidently better than 2.4. Under the new metrics, you set a goal around presence in valuable real estate — say, appearing in the absolute-top slot a target share of the time for your most important queries — and you diagnose shortfalls by reading whether you are losing top placement to budget or to Ad Rank. It is a move from an ambiguous ordinal to explicit, actionable location share. Anyone still framing search-ad prominence in terms of average position is using a vocabulary Google removed years ago, and mapping their intent onto top and absolute-top impression share is the correct translation.

Since average position no longer exists, using it well means retiring it and adopting the replacements deliberately. Decide what prominence a campaign needs — top-of-page presence for high-intent branded or competitive terms, less so for broad prospecting — and set targets in absolute top and top impression share rather than a rank number. When prominence falls short, read the lost-impression-share metrics to see whether budget or Ad Rank is the constraint, because the fix differs: budget calls for spend, rank calls for better bids, quality, or relevance. Audit old automated rules, scripts, and dashboards for any lingering average-position references and rip them out, since they now pull nothing or silently fail.

The failure modes are almost all failures to let go. Optimizing toward a target average position is optimizing toward a metric that was removed and that never meant page location anyway. Assuming a good rank equals a good spot — treating position 1 as top of page — repeats the original misunderstanding. Leaving legacy scripts, portfolio rules, or reports keyed to average position in place quietly breaks automation. And answering a stakeholder's average-position question with an average-position answer, rather than translating it into top and absolute-top impression share, keeps a dead metric alive in the conversation. The discipline is to speak in page-location share, diagnose with lost-share metrics, and treat average position as history.

Average position was a Google Ads ad-rank metric that Google sunset in 2019, replacing it with top and absolute-top impression-share metrics that describe actual page location.

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