What does position mean?

How the score is computed

Each mention with a known place in the answer text gets a score from 0 to 100 by how early it appears. An answer that opens with your name scores 100; one that names you in the last line scores near 0. Your position score for a window is the average of those per-answer scores, taken over the answers that name you. Only the first mention in each answer counts for position, so being named three times late in the text does not raise it.

A brand that appears only in the cited sources and is never named in the text is left out of the average rather than scored zero. Position is about the words the reader sees, not the links under them.

Why it is read next to mention rate

On its own, a high position score can mislead. A brand named early in two answers out of thirty has a fine position and a poor mention rate. That is why the page splits prompts into four quadrants at 50% and 50 points: healthy is named often and early, improve position is named often but late, improve visibility is named early when it appears but rarely, and weak is neither. The weakest prompts, and the ones a competitor wins by the widest margin, are what we write for next.

What it is not

Position score does not compare you with anyone. Two brands can both score 90 on the same prompt if each opens the answers it appears in. The Position Quality report is where the comparison lives: it shows which brand tends to be mentioned first across the same answers.