> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Ranking by Intent, Google Search Console

> Groups your organic average position by search intent (informational, navigational, commercial, transactional) to show where you rank strongest. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it.

**Card class:** [Non-Hero](/nerve-centre/overview#card-classes-explained)  •  **Category:** [Ranking Analysis](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type)

## At a glance

> **Ranking by Intent** is a grouped-bar view of your Google Search Console average position broken down by search intent: informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. It shows whether you rank best for people researching, people looking for you by name, people comparing options, or people ready to buy, so SEO and content teams can see which stage of the journey their organic presence actually owns.

## What it tracks

The detail backing this card is "Ranking by Intent for the selected period." We pull queries and their impression-weighted average position from the Search Console Search Analytics API (`searchanalytics.query` with the `query` dimension) for the chosen date range, classify each query into an intent bucket using language patterns (for example "how to" and "what is" signal informational; "buy", "price", "discount" signal transactional; "best", "vs", "review" signal commercial; brand and URL-like terms signal navigational), then plot the average position per bucket as grouped bars. A strong transactional bar with a weak commercial bar, for instance, says you convert people who already want you but lose the comparison shoppers upstream. The card carries no time-window badge or alert; it is a diagnostic you scope to the dashboard date range and read alongside the intent and ranking siblings.

## Reconciling against the source

Search Console has no native "intent" grouping, so rebuild it in **Performance → Search results → Queries** by applying query filters (regex) for each intent pattern and reading the average position per filter. Note Search Console data is typically 2 to 3 days delayed, omits rare (anonymised) queries, and the UI caps at 1,000 rows, so tail queries are partly missing from both views; intent classification is also a heuristic, so borderline queries can land in a different bucket than you might assign by hand.

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### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

*Ranking by Intent* 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](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.