TL;DR
A client once told me they were first for their main term and the phone was not ringing. Both were true and only the second mattered. Rankings were a reasonable proxy when a result page was ten blue links. Sixty-eight per cent of searches now end without a click. Report enquiries first.
A client once told me they were first for their main term and the phone was not ringing. Both statements were true, and the second one is the only one that mattered.
Rankings are a proxy. They were a reasonable proxy when a result page was ten blue links and position one meant most of the clicks. They are a much weaker proxy now, and reporting them as the outcome quietly lets everyone avoid the question of whether the work produced anything.
Why the proxy broke
Three things happened, and they compound.
The result page stopped sending clicks. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb’s US clickstream found 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024, with AI Overviews on over 20% of searches cutting click-through by roughly 60% where they appear. Position one on a query that sends nobody anywhere is a screenshot, not a result.
Position stopped meaning one thing. Google’s own documentation defines average position as the topmost position you occupied, averaged across the queries where you appeared, and warns it is “a complex metric that can be misleading if you don’t understand the subtleties.” Position three under a map pack, an AI overview and four ads is not position three as anyone imagines it.
Personalisation and location. There is no single ranking to report. The number in the tool is one sample.
What I would report instead
In rough order of how close each sits to the money.
- Enquiries, by source. Calls, forms, bookings. If you cannot attribute them, count them anyway. A total that moves is more informative than a position that does not.
- Clicks, not impressions. Impressions measure how often you appeared, which is partly a function of how deep result sets ran. Twenty-five thousand impressions on a query with no commercial relevance is not an opportunity, and it will make a chart look excellent.
- Share of clicks on the queries you care about. Pick the twenty or thirty terms that describe your actual business and track clicks on those as a set. This is the closest honest substitute for “are we winning” and it ignores the thousands of irrelevant terms inflating your totals.
- Pages entering the index that were meant to. A blunt but useful health metric on any site publishing regularly.
- Speed to first response. Not an SEO metric and it belongs on the same page as them, because it decides what the traffic converts to. MIT’s study of 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts found the odds of qualifying a lead falling twenty-one-fold between a five-minute and a thirty-minute response.
What I would stop reporting
Keyword count. “Ranking for 26,618 keywords” sounds like progress. I have seen a site ranking for ten thousand more terms than its competitor and converting almost none of them into positions anybody sees. Hit rate beats presence every time.
Domain authority scores. Third-party inventions, useful for rough comparison and meaningless as a target. Reporting them monthly trains the client to care about a number no search engine uses.
Average position across everything. An average over a mixed bag of relevant and irrelevant queries, where losing bad rankings improves the number.
Anything the client cannot act on. If a number moving would not change what anybody does next week, it is decoration.
The awkward part
These metrics are less flattering. Positions improve steadily and enquiries do not. They jump, stall, and depend on things I do not control, like whether anybody answers the phone.
Reporting them means occasionally showing a month where the work went well and the number did not move. I think that is the right trade, and it is the reason most reporting avoids it.
The short version
- Rankings are a proxy and the proxy weakened. 68% of searches end without a click.
- Position one on a zero-click query is a screenshot.
- Google warns average position misleads. It is topmost-position-averaged.
- Report enquiries first, even unattributed.
- Clicks on a chosen query set beats totals inflated by irrelevant terms.
- Put speed-to-response on the same page. 21-fold difference between five and thirty minutes.
- Drop keyword counts and authority scores. If nobody acts on it, it is decoration.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO consulting covers what to measure and what to ignore. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
