Average Position
The typical rank or order at which a brand or link appears within a list of results or an AI answer.
What is Average Position?
Average position measures where a brand or link typically lands within a ranked list, a search results page, a competitor comparison, or an AI-generated answer. It's expressed as a single number: the lower the number, the closer to the top a brand tends to appear. For example, if a running-shoe brand shows up 2nd, 5th, and 3rd across three tracked results, its average position for that sample is roughly 3.3.
Why it matters
The concept originates in search-rank tracking, where Google Search Console defines it precisely as the average of the topmost position a page occupied across all recorded impressions for a query, not a simple mean of every individual result slot. Applied to generative AI answers, "position" usually refers to where a brand is mentioned within a response or its rank inside a synthesized list, averaged across a batch of prompts run repeatedly over time. Because AI answers vary between runs due to model non-determinism and updates, tools typically sample the same prompt multiple times before averaging, and some report a median or distribution instead of a single mean to dampen outliers. A significant nuance: prompts where the brand isn't mentioned at all are often excluded from the calculation rather than counted as a worst-case position, which can make the metric look better than the brand's real-world visibility. Ranketta reports average position as one of its tracked AI-visibility metrics, sampling each prompt multiple times before averaging to reduce noise from run-to-run variance.