Search and the web
Everything on a results page that is not one of the ten links — and most of it answers the question without sending anyone anywhere.
Also called Search feature · AI Overview · Элемент выдачи
An AI overview, a related-questions panel, a map pack, a shopping row, a video carousel, a definition lifted out of a page. Each occupies the space a listing used to occupy, and each is assembled from pages rather than replacing them, which means a site can be the source of the answer and receive nothing for it.
This is what makes an impression and a position ambiguous at the same time. Appearing inside a feature counts as an impression at the position the feature holds, so a site can watch its average position improve while its clicks fall, and both numbers are correct. Only the pair, read together, describes what happened.
The strategic reading is unwelcome and worth stating plainly: for a query whose answer fits in a sentence, the sentence is now given on the page, and the click was never going to survive. The queries that still send readers are the ones whose answers do not compress — a method, a comparison with reasons, a measurement somebody has to see the working of.
Being quoted in an overview is not a position and cannot be bought, tracked reliably, or held. Sites that reorganise their writing to be extractable often succeed at being extracted and fail at being visited, which is a worse outcome than the ranking they gave up. Decide first whether the query is one you want traffic from or credit in; they are different goals and the second one pays later, if at all.
Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.
- Testing a ranking report
- “You now rank in the top ten for 47 keywords, up from 12.” · 25 minutes, 5 questions.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.