A very common question I see SEOs and publishers ask is that they see that Google Search Console shows them in position 3 for a query but when they look at the actual search results page, they are not in that position. Or similar related questions that what they see in the actual search results does not match what they see in the performance report in Search Console.

Like I said, it is a very common question and the response is very common too. In short, what you might see in the Google search results, the next person might not see. It can be around geo-specific changes, it can be around personalization or even data center fluctuations.

In addition, to make things worse – it might be that you are in that top position and getting a ton of impressions but you just don’t see it. Meaning, you are maybe an image in a featured snippet and Google is counting those impressions but you don’t think to look at the images in the featured snippet, you just look at the search results.

John Mueller of Google was asked about this on Reddit and said:

So you probably can trust the Search Console performance report, you just need to learn how to filter the report and dive into how to see the search results page as the performance report reports on it.

Forum discussion at Reddit.