If your Search Console impressions are climbing and your clicks are not, the report is not broken and you have not necessarily lost your rankings. The performance report counts an impression when a link of yours appears in a page of Google results, whether or not anyone saw it, wanted it or scrolled to it. Clicks are counted on a much narrower set of events. Between the two sits the number that confuses most owners: average position, which is one average over every query your site appeared for, so a handful of page-one appearances and a pile of page-five appearances average out to a number that looks neither.
What the performance report counts, in plain words
Google’s own help page defines the four numbers on the top of the report. Here is each one in the words it uses.
- Impressions
- How often a link to your site appeared on Google. Google counts it when the item appears in the current page of results, whether or not the reader scrolled to it.
- Clicks
- How often someone clicked a link from Google to your site. For most result types, only a click that takes the person off Google’s pages counts.
- Click-through rate
- Clicks divided by impressions. A small site with thousands of impressions and a few dozen clicks will always have a small number here.
- Average position
- Where your link sat in the results, where 1 is the top position. Google records the topmost position your page held for each query, then averages those across every query you appeared for.
Two of those definitions decide the whole argument of this article, so they are worth reading twice.
An impression is counted “whenever an item appears in the current page of results, whether or not the item is scrolled into view”. Your page can sit below the fold of page four and still add an impression. Google says it plainly, and it is the reason a report full of impressions can still earn almost nothing.
Average position has a second rule that surprises people. Google says: “A link must get an impression for its position to be recorded.” A page that appeared on page three of the results, but that the reader never scrolled to, is not in the average at all. So the number is built from the appearances you did get, not from every appearance you might have had.
Why impressions rise and clicks do not
There are three ordinary reasons, and they need different answers.
The impressions are for searches that are not your business. A site that ranks widely, rather than well, collects impressions for questions it has no intention of serving. Nobody is waiting for your quotation form to answer a question about a different trade.
The impressions are too deep to be clicked. Past the first page, many of the results are never reached. Google does not record a position for a result the reader never saw, and a click at position 30 needs the reader to scroll further than a click on page one.
The title and the snippet do not match the search. On page one, an impression with no click is usually a writing problem rather than a ranking problem. Google puts it the same way: a low click-through rate “can indicate that users see your page in Search results but don’t think it answers their query”. The page was found and was not chosen.
Only the third of those is fixed by rewriting something. The first two are fixed by deciding what you are trying to rank for, which is a smaller job than it sounds.
Average position hides the split that matters
This is the number we would change first in most small sites’ reports, and it is the one most guides leave alone.
Google’s worked example on its help page: if your property returns at positions 2, 4 and 6 for one query, its position counts as 2. If it returns at 3, 5 and 9 for another, it counts as 3. The average across those two queries is 2.5.
Read that as a traffic report rather than a maths exercise. Average position 24.8 can be one strong query sitting at position 2 and a long tail sitting at position 40. It can also be every single query sitting between 20 and 30. The report gives you one number for both, and the number tells you nothing about which one you have.
So do not read the average on its own. Split it.
- Open the performance report for your property and set the date range to the last 28 days.
- Open the Queries tab, where the table shows a position column.
- Add a filter: Query, then Position, then “Greater than 10”.
- Read the impression total that filter returns against the total at the top of the chart.
- Look at whether those queries are about your business. If they are not, your average position is mostly a number about searches you do not want.
A worked case: 19 days on a small Singapore site
Our own site is a small one, so we ran the same checks on it rather than describing them. The figures below are the first 19 days of September 2026, taken from our own Search Console data.
The report said 21,858 impressions and 47 clicks, a click-through rate of 0.215%, at an average position of 24.8. On its own that looks like a ranking failure. Split by position, it is something else.
| Position band | Impressions | Share of labelled impressions | Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 3 | 173 | 1.3% | 1 |
| 4 to 10 | 1,393 | 10.4% | 4 |
| 11 to 20 | 2,226 | 16.5% | 1 |
| 21 to 30 | 3,427 | 25.5% | 0 |
| 31 to 50 | 2,050 | 15.2% | 0 |
| 51 and deeper | 4,183 | 31.1% | 0 |
| Total | 13,452 | 100% | 6 |
88.4% of the labelled impressions, 11,886 of them, sat at position 11 or deeper. Those impressions earned one click in 19 days. Positions 1 to 3 held 173 impressions. Position 24.8 is not a page-three placement. It is the average of a small page-one group and a very large page-three-to-page-six group.
Google’s own training team walks through the same report on screen, if you would rather watch the filters being clicked than read them described.
We picked this one because it is Google’s own team showing the report they built, and because it was published in December 2025, after most of the training still circulating online was made. The section it sits in reads the same if the video is taken down.
The second check changed the reading again. Of the 21,858 impressions in the report, 13,452 carried a query label. The other 8,406, which is 38% of the total, carried none.
So the honest summary of that month is not “we fell to page three”. It is that a large part of the impression count was for searches the site should not have been in, and the rest was too deep to convert. The fix was never a ranking push on those queries.
Why your Queries tab totals less than the chart
If you add up the rows in the Queries tab and get a smaller number than the chart above them, you have not made a mistake.
Google’s help on advanced filtering says: “Filtering your data by query or URL can affect the report totals due to data truncation and the omission of anonymized queries.” Rare searches are held back rather than shown, so the table is a partial view of the same total.
On our site the gap was 8,406 impressions, or 38% of the month’s total. A small site sees a large gap, because a large share of its searches are rare ones. That is also why an owner who filters their report down to one page, or one country, can end up with numbers that do not reconcile with the chart. The filter is not broken. It is narrower than the picture it sits inside.
Compare periods per day, not by raw totals
The second number that misleads is the month-on-month jump.
Our September was 19 days long. Read as raw totals, it showed 47 clicks against August’s 40, a gain of 17%. Divide by the days in each month and the real figure is 2.47 clicks a day against 1.29, a gain of 92%. Run the same arithmetic on impressions and the story inverts: 21,858 against 43,997 looks like a collapse of 50%, while per day it is 1,150 against 1,419, a fall of 19%.
Both of those are one-day noise on a partial month rather than movement, and a raw totals row would have told you the opposite story twice.
Search Console can do the comparison for you. Open the Date filter, choose Compare, and pick two periods. Google’s own guidance on comparing two date ranges is worth following: switch the granularity to Weekly or Monthly, because aggregating by week or month “neutralizes the ‘day-of-the-week’ effect … and provides a clearer, more accurate comparison of true long-term performance trends”. Comparing a Monday against a Saturday tells you about calendars, not about your site. You can hold one comparison at a time, so clear it before you set the next.
Filter by page and by query to find what earns
The chart tells you what happened. The two tabs tell you where.
Open the Pages tab and sort by clicks, then by impressions. The two orderings rarely match, and the gap between them is the useful part: a page with many impressions and no clicks is either too deep or not answering the question. A page with clicks but few impressions is doing more than it is being given, and is the cheapest thing on the list to grow.
Then go back to Queries and read the top rows as sentences. If a query is not something your business would want to be found for, its impressions are not an opportunity. On our own site, most of the deep impressions were for searches well outside the work we do, which is why the average position improved while the clicks stayed small.
One more thing Google’s help flags for the Pages tab: the table is aggregated by page, so its totals can differ from the property-level totals in the chart. Same cause as the query gap above.
Why Search Console clicks do not match Analytics sessions
These two numbers count different events, and no setting will make them agree.
Search Console counts the click on Google’s results page, and Google’s help is specific about which clicks those are: “any click that sends the user to a page outside of Google Search, Discover, or News is counted as a click”. A click that starts another search, or opens a panel inside Google, is not one of them. The report also only shows data for links pointing at the property you are looking at, for privacy reasons, so traffic between two properties of yours can be visible in one place and absent from the other.
Analytics counts something else: sessions on your own site. Google defines a session as “a period of time during which a user interacts with your website or app”, and by default a session times out after 30 minutes of inactivity. A reader who clicks your listing, comes back the next day from a link in an email and reads three pages is one Search Console click and two Analytics sessions.
So the test is not whether the two numbers match. It is whether they move together over the same period. When one rises and the other does not, the report is telling you something real, and the queries tab is where you find out what.
What changed in the report in 2026
One dated note, because it changes what some sites will see. Google announced on 24 September 2026 that it is adding a multimodal search type to the performance report, in the report for performance on Search results and in the report for Generative AI features.
Google says the data covers “searches with Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and the Chrome right-click ‘Search this image’ feature”. It began rolling out globally on that date, and Google’s wording on visibility is conditional: “You will start seeing these metrics in your Performance report if your site is receiving traffic from these queries.”
There is also a branded queries filter, which splits your queries into the ones carrying your brand name and the ones that do not. Google says it has been available since 11 March 2025, works across web, image, video and news search, and is not offered for sub-properties, which are a separate address on your site such as a blog folder, or for sites with a low number of impressions. If yours does not appear in the filter list, that is why.
One check to run in your own report
Open the performance report. Set the date range to the last 28 days. Open the Queries tab and add a position filter of greater than 10.
Then ask one question of the rows that come back: are those searches about your business? If they are, you have a ranking problem and you know which queries it is. If most of them are not, your report is telling you that the site is showing up in places you never wanted, and that is a different job with a different fix.
Either way, it takes five minutes and it is the check that turns the report from a number you worry about into a list of decisions.
What is a good click-through rate in Search Console?
There is no target number, because the number depends on how deep your impressions sit. A site ranking at positions 20 to 30 will show a small rate whatever it does, and the same site ranking at position 2 would show a large one on the same content. Look at the rate on the queries that sit on page one, where a click is genuinely available to lose.
Does a rise in impressions mean my rankings improved?
Not on its own. Impressions rise when you are shown more often, which includes being shown for searches that are not your business and being shown deeper down the results. Compare two periods per day and look at average position beside impressions, not impressions alone.
Why does my average position look better than my traffic?
Because it is an average. A single query sitting at position 2 lifts the mean of hundreds of queries at position 30. Filter the Queries tab to position greater than 10 and see how much of the total sits there.
Should I worry about a low click-through rate on a page with no impressions?
No. Google only calculates a rate where there is something to divide. A page with no impressions has no click-through rate to read, and the question to ask is why it is not appearing, which is an indexing question rather than a click question.
What to read next
The next step is not another report. It is checking the rest of what Search Console knows about your site, which is where the indexing problems show up. Our guide to checking your website’s SEO for free starts from Search Console indexing and works through the two other free checks.
Our own note on reading Search Console and Analytics search terms together goes deeper on the two-number problem above.