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Card class: Non-Hero • Category: Ranking Analysis

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At a glance

Queries Dropping from Top 10 is a table of the search terms whose average position slipped from inside the top 10 (page one) to below it this period, broken down row by row. Falling off page one is where the steepest CTR cliff lives, so these queries are losing clicks fast. Treat the list as a priority recovery queue, the highest-volume drops first.

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What it tracks

The card lists Queries Dropping from Top 10, broken down by row, comparing average position period on period from the Search Console Search Analytics API. A query qualifies when its average position was 10 or better in the prior period and has now fallen past position 10, meaning it has effectively left page one of the Search results. This matters more than a small mid-page wobble because click-through rate falls sharply at the page-one boundary: a query slipping from position 9 to 11 can lose the large majority of its clicks even though the position only moved a couple of places. Each row shows the term, its old and new average position, and the associated clicks and impressions so you can size the loss. Causes to check: a competitor publishing stronger content, a page that lost internal links or freshness, a Core Web Vitals or mobile-usability regression dragging the page, keyword cannibalisation between two of your own pages, or a broad algorithm update. Read every row against your website’s organic search presence: a term that dropped but still has high impressions is recoverable demand worth defending, whereas a term that lost both position and impressions may simply reflect cooling search interest.

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Reconciling against the source

Reconcile against Search Console, Performance, Search results, grouping by Query, enabling Average position, and using date comparison across the same two periods. Search Console data is typically 2 to 3 days delayed, average position is itself an average across impressions (so a query straddling the boundary can read just over or just under 10), rare queries are anonymised, and the UI caps at 1,000 rows; for the full set, diff period-over-period query positions via the Search Analytics API.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Queries Dropping from Top 10 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.