Documentation
New & Lost Rankings
Find the queries and pages that had impressions in one period but not the other, with their clicks, impressions and position, to explain traffic swings.
New & Lost Rankings shows what entered and left your search visibility between two periods. A query or page is new when Search Console recorded impressions for it in your date range but none in the comparison period, and lost when it had impressions in the comparison period and none now. When traffic moves while the top pages look unchanged, this report usually shows where the difference went.
Reading the report
Four cards count New Queries, Lost Queries, New Pages and Lost Pages. Two switches pick what the table lists: New or Lost, and Queries or Pages. Each row shows clicks, impressions, CTR (from the column button) and average position. New rows carry the current period's numbers and lost rows the comparison period's, because that is when they last had impressions. Sort by impressions to see which changes carried weight.
Every row counts once however small it is, so a query with one impression adds as much to the card totals as one with a thousand. Read the counts as a signal and the impressions as the size of the change. The report needs a comparison period.
Why queries appear and disappear
- The edge of visibility. Google records a position for your site only when your result was shown, so a query on which you sit far down the results can come and go without any real change.
- Privacy filtering. Rare queries are withheld from the rows (Google's explanation), so a query that falls below that bar looks lost even if it still brings the odd click.
- Real changes. New pages earning their first impressions, pages removed or redirected, a section kept out of the index, or a Google update favouring or demoting a kind of content.
What to do with it
- Lost pages: check that each URL still exists and can be indexed. URL Inspection shows Google's view of it. A redirect, or a canonical pointing elsewhere, moves the impressions to another URL, which then appears as a new page.
- Lost queries with real volume: open Queries for the detail view of the query, see which page ranked for it before, and compare that page with what ranks now.
- New queries: they show demand you have begun to reach. Those without a page written for them are topic candidates, and the content engine picks up such Search Console finds by itself.
Query tables offer Save to keyword library, and every table exports to CSV (Exporting data).