Impressions
An impression is counted each time your page appears in search results for a query, whether or not anyone scrolls to see it. Search Console reports impressions alongside clicks, and the relationship between them reveals how visible and how compelling you are.
Why it matters for your rankings
Impressions measure opportunity, and they move before clicks do. A page climbing from position 40 to 15 earns far more impressions while gaining few clicks, which is early evidence that content work is taking effect.
Read alone they mislead. Rising impressions with flat clicks usually means you are surfacing for broader, less relevant queries rather than improving on the ones that matter. Falling impressions with steady clicks can be healthy, indicating you lost irrelevant visibility. The pairing to watch is impressions against average position: if impressions rise while position falls, you are appearing for more queries but ranking worse across them, which is a relevance problem rather than a growth story.
How to check it on your site
Compare impressions and clicks together
In Search Console Performance, enable both metrics plus average position and read the three trend lines against each other.
Segment branded and non-branded
Branded impressions reflect marketing and PR activity rather than SEO. Non-branded impressions are the ones that show whether your search work is progressing.
Find high-impression, low-click pages
These rank but fail to attract the click, which is a title and description problem, not a ranking one.
Track by query group
Filter to the query themes that matter commercially rather than reading a site-wide total.