A striking-distance query is one sitting at an average position between 8 and 20 with at least 50 impressions in the window. That is the exact band Market4's sc_striking_distance rule looks in: the bottom of page one and the whole of page two, where Google already shows the site but just below where people click. Everything above position 8 is already winning and the work there is defence. Everything past position 20 is usually a content problem rather than an optimisation problem.
Positions 8, 9 and 10 are on page one and still worth working, which is why the striking-distance band starts at 8 rather than at the page boundary. A result at the bottom of page one gets impressions that a page-two result does not, and moving it up two places moves it into the part of the page where clicks actually happen. Drawing the line at 11 would exclude the cheapest wins on the site on the grounds of a page break that no longer describes how people scroll.
The ceiling is where the reasoning reverses. Past position 20 the distance is rarely something a title rewrite closes, and telling somebody they rank 34th and should push harder is not an action anyone can take. The rule stays quiet there on purpose, so that what it does report is a list of edits rather than a list of ambitions.
Fifty impressions across the window is roughly twice a day that somebody saw the result, which is about where a rank improvement is worth a person's afternoon. The floor is an estimate rather than a finding, and it is documented as one in the source: lower and the list fills with one-off long-tail queries nobody will ever write for, much higher and a new site never sees a single suggestion.
| Where the query sits | Whether it is reported | The reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Positions 1 to 7 | No | Already winning. The work there is defending a ranking, not gaining one |
| Positions 8 to 20 | Yes, with 50 or more impressions | Google shows the page already; a small rank gain pays for itself |
| Past position 20 | No | The gap is usually a content gap, and "push harder" is not an action |
| Under 50 impressions | No | Long-tail one-offs would crowd out the queries a rewrite could move |
You do not need a rank tracker to find pages competing with each other. One Search Console report with both dimensions in it will do, if you know the thresholds.
Search Console's regex filters are RE2 expressions, which is a deliberately smaller syntax than the one most regex tutorials teach. What RE2 leaves out, what to write in place of each missing construct, and the two things a filter does not change.
Market4 turns one release note into a changelog page, a blog post, a mail-out and a week of social posts — and then tells you which of them brought anyone back.
Two things order a striking-distance list: reach and headroom. Reach is how many people already see the result, saturating once impressions are several times the floor, so a query with 400 impressions and one with 4,000 are not separated by a factor of ten. Headroom is how far the query has to climb before it is on page one, normalised across the band, so a query at position 9 scores higher than one at position 19 with the same reach. Nothing else is inferred, because position and impressions both come straight from Google.
Each finding also carries a "what would this be worth" figure, and that figure is priced at position 5 rather than position 1. The middle of page one is a place a rewrite can realistically reach; the top spot is a promise nobody can keep, and pricing the work at a number the reader is unlikely to reach turns an honest calculation into a sales pitch. The number is impressions multiplied by the expected click-through rate at position 5.
Where that expected rate comes from is stated in every finding rather than assumed. A property with enough of its own stored Search Console history gets a curve fitted to its own position-to-CTR behaviour; one without falls back to a baseline table. The two answer different questions, and a finding that did not say which it used would invite a reader to treat an industry average as their own measurement.
The action for a striking-distance query is a rewrite of the page that already ranks, not a new page. A second page on the same subject splits the signals between two URLs and usually leaves both below where the first one was. The page to edit is whichever one Search Console shows ranking for that query, which is not always the page anyone intended to rank for it.
One more thing worth saying about the whole band: a striking-distance list is only as long as the queries Search Console has attributed to the site. When no query rows exist in the window, the rule reports that fact and stops rather than returning an empty list, because "nothing to work on" and "nothing measured yet" are different situations with different next steps.
Commonly it means a query ranking close enough to page one that a modest improvement produces a real click gain. Market4 fixes that as positions 8 to 20 with at least 50 impressions in the window. The lower bound is set at 8 rather than 11 because positions 8 to 10 are still on page one and still below where most clicks land, so they are among the cheapest gains available.
Because position 5 is a place a rewrite can plausibly reach and position 1 is not something anyone can promise. Pricing the work at the top spot inflates every estimate and turns a true calculation into a sales pitch. The figure shown is the query's impressions multiplied by the expected click-through rate at position 5, using the property's own fitted curve where one exists.
Usually not. The page already ranks, so the work is making it obviously the better answer: the exact phrase in the title and opening paragraph, the question answered in the first two sentences, and an internal link from a stronger related page. A second page on the same subject splits the ranking signals and often leaves both pages worse off than the original.
It falls under the impressions floor of 50 for the window. The floor exists so the list stays a set of edits worth doing rather than a long tail of queries that were seen once. The threshold is a judgement rather than a measured optimum, and it is documented as an estimate in the rule itself so nobody mistakes it for a finding.
Search Console will group performance rows by seven dimensions, and searchAppearance is the one that says which result feature an impression came from. It also changes how the totals are aggregated, which is the part that surprises people.
