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Card class: Non-Hero • Category: Top Queries & Pages

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At a glance

Position Distribution is a histogram of the average position of each query your site ranks for over the trailing 30 days. The bars count how many queries fall into each position band (1 to 3, 4 to 10, 11 to 20 and so on). A bell curve shifted right means ranking decay across the board, while a curve weighted toward the low bands means a healthy concentration of queries near the top of page one.

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What it tracks

This card reads the query dimension and the average position metric from the Google Search Console Search Analytics API over a 30-day window, then buckets every query by its average position and counts how many land in each band. The result is a shape, not a single number, and the shape is what carries the signal: where the mass of your queries sits tells you the overall health of your organic footprint better than any one ranking. Watch the centre of gravity move over time. If the whole histogram drifts right (more queries in the 11-to-20 and 21-plus bands, fewer in the top bands), rankings are decaying across the site, which usually points to a broad cause such as an algorithm update, a technical regression or rising competition rather than a single page problem. A curve building up in the 4-to-10 band is an opportunity store: those queries are one push away from the top three, where the bulk of clicks happen. Because the histogram counts queries equally, a long tail of rarely seen queries can dominate the right-hand bars without mattering much for traffic, so cross-read it with impression volume. Pair this card with Position Histogram, Ranking Distribution, Position Trend, Average Position and Queries Entering Top 10.

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Reconciling against the source

Search Console has no native histogram view, so rebuild it from Performance, Search results by setting the date range to the last 28 days, ticking Average position and exporting the Queries table to bucket positions yourself. Search Console data is typically 2 to 3 days delayed, anonymises rare queries and the UI caps at 1,000 rows, so the API-driven distribution here can include more long-tail queries than the native export shows.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Position Distribution is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Google Search Console and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.