The queries sitting just off page one.
Queries you already rank for at positions 11 to 20, with enough impressions behind them to be worth the work, valued against the click-through rate your own site earns at the positions above them.
Positions 11 to 20, seen on at least five days.
Striking distance is an easy list to pad. Every threshold Prism applies is exported from the code that applies it and shown on the report, so you can tell why a query you expected is absent.
- An average position of 10.5 to 20.5
- Page two and the top of page three. Past that, getting to page one is not an improvement, it is a different page.
- Seen on five days or more
- A query Google showed you on one or two days has an average position that is an accident of when it was seen, not a ranking.
- An impression floor that scales
- The minimum scales with the length of the window rather than being a flat number, because 50 impressions means something very different over a week than over sixteen months.
- Joined to the page that ranks
- Each query carries the on-page state of the URL ranking for it, read from your last crawl, so you can see whether the fix is the page or the query.
Valued against your click-through rate, not an industry table.
The upside of moving a query is worth nothing if the number behind it came from somebody else's data. Prism fits the curve on your rows, every time the report runs.
- Your own median, per position
- Every qualifying row on the property is grouped by ranking position, and the median click-through rate in each band becomes the expectation for that band.
- Bands that cannot be judged say so
- A position band with fewer than eight qualifying rows is reported as unusable and its rows are excluded, rather than being measured against noise.
- No purchased benchmark
- There is no industry click-through table in Prism, because we cannot source one that would survive being questioned. Your own rows are the only curve that describes your own snippets.
Two more lists on the same report.
Below your own curve. Pages earning materially less than the median for the position they rank at. A row is flagged only when it is both well under that median and far enough from it to be distinguishable from chance, and only when recovering would be worth at least one click. Either test alone flags half the site.
In sustained decline. Pages tested across six consecutive 28-day periods with a trend test rather than a comparison of the first and last. A page that dropped once and recovered is not decaying, and one collapsed month cannot put a page on this list on its own.
- the positions striking distance covers
- 11-20
- the positions striking distance covers
- days a query must have been seen on
- 5
- days a query must have been seen on
- days of history the decay test reads
- 168
- days of history the decay test reads
- credits used by the report
- 0
- credits used by the report
Frequently asked questions
What counts as striking distance?
An average position between 10.5 and 20.5 over the window, which is page two and the top of page three. A query also has to have been seen on at least five days, because an average position built from one or two days is an accident of when Google happened to show you, and it has to clear an impression floor that scales with the window rather than a flat number.
How is the upside worked out?
Against your own click-through curve, not an industry table. Prism takes every qualifying row on the property, groups them by ranking position, and uses the median click-through rate in each position band as the expectation for that band. A band with fewer than eight qualifying rows is reported as unusable rather than being judged against noise. The upside of a query is what its impressions would earn at the bottom of page one on your own curve.
Why not use a published CTR benchmark?
Because we cannot source one. A benchmark table would be a number on your report that nobody here can defend, and a brand query and a comparison query at the same position behave nothing alike anyway. Your own rows are the only curve that describes your own snippets.
What else is on the report?
Two more lists. Pages earning materially less than your curve says they should, flagged only when they are both well below the median for their band and statistically distinguishable from it. And pages in sustained decline, tested over six consecutive 28-day periods with a trend test, so one bad month cannot put a page on the list.
Elsewhere in Prism
Where the work usually goes next
- Keyword cannibalization A query stuck on page two is often two of your pages splitting it. Check that before rewriting either.
- Internal link analysis The cheapest lift for a page-two page is usually a link from a page that already ranks for the same query.
- Site Health 14 reports off a crawl, so you can see whether the page ranking for the query is sound before you touch the copy.
More features
- Data warehousing Google serves a rolling 16 months and drops the rest. Prism syncs Search Console into its own store daily, re-pulls the days Google revises, and keeps all of them.
- Site crawling Prism crawls your site, scores each page with Lighthouse, and reads the X-Robots-Tag header and the robots meta. Compare any two crawls to see what a release changed.
- AI answer monitoring Prompts put to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule, the complete answer kept, so every report number traces back to the sentence it came from.
- Smart Campaigns Define a campaign by URL and query pattern plus dates, and Prism tracks the group as one thing. The indexed view rebases each campaign to 100 so big and small compare.
- Segments A saved query or URL group built from plain rules. Pick one in the toolbar and every Search Performance report stays scoped to it. Brand vs non-brand in one click.
- Keyword cannibalization Find the queries where two of your own pages split the impressions, with each contender’s share and the best-positioned page named as the one to consolidate into. Read from your own Search Console data.
- Internal link analysis Your internal links as a graph: link equity per page, orphans, click depth, the anchor text you actually use, and pages that rank for the same query with no link between them.
The first list is usually the shortest route to more clicks.
Connect Search Console and Opportunities is there on the first sync. Striking distance, defined.