What Ad Rank Is (and Why You Can’t “Look Up” a Single Ad Rank Number)
In Google Ads, Ad Rank isn’t a static score you can pull up like a keyword bid or a Quality Score. It’s a set of values calculated in real time for each auction that determines two things: whether your ad is eligible to show at all, and if it is eligible, where it can show on the page relative to other advertisers.
That’s why many advertisers go hunting for an “Ad Rank” column and can’t find one. For most accounts, there is no single “Ad Rank” metric displayed in the interface because Ad Rank changes from search to search based on auction conditions.
Practically, Ad Rank is influenced by a mix of factors you control and factors you don’t. The controllable inputs include your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page experience, and the expected impact of assets (formerly extensions) and ad formats. The auction also applies Ad Rank thresholds, which can be higher for lower-quality ads, higher positions, certain query topics, and different user contexts like device and location.
The right mindset is: you don’t “check Ad Rank” directly—you diagnose it using the reporting and diagnostics that reveal whether you’re losing visibility due to rank (quality/bid/competition) versus budget or targeting.
How to Check Ad Rank Indirectly (The Methods That Actually Work)
1) Start with the clearest proxy: “Lost IS (rank)” and Impression Share
If you want the fastest, most actionable read on whether Ad Rank is holding you back, look at impression share and especially the lost impression share due to rank metrics. These don’t tell you “your Ad Rank is X,” but they do tell you how often you could have shown and didn’t because your Ad Rank wasn’t strong enough.
When “Lost IS (rank)” is high, you’re essentially being told: you were eligible to compete, but your ad didn’t win enough auctions. That’s an Ad Rank issue—typically bid, quality, assets/ad formats, or simply tougher competition in that segment.
Also note that impression share metrics are reported per campaign type (they aren’t rolled up into one universal number across your whole account), and they typically update with a short delay (commonly within 1–2 days). So use a meaningful date range and don’t overreact to today’s partial data.
- Diagnostic shortcut: If “Lost IS (rank)” is high and “Lost IS (budget)” is low, you have a rank limitation (not a budget limitation).
- Decision shortcut: If both are high, you have a two-part problem—budget caps are preventing participation in some auctions, and rank is losing others.
2) Check “Top” and “Absolute Top” metrics to understand where your Ad Rank is landing
It’s possible to show regularly and still feel “invisible” because you’re showing low on the page. That’s why I treat Ad Rank diagnosis as a two-step question: Are we showing? and Where are we showing when we do?
The top and absolute top metrics help you measure prominence. “Top” indicates impressions above the organic results (not necessarily the first ad). “Absolute top” indicates the very first ad position above the organic results. Pair these with the corresponding lost top/absolute top impression share (rank) metrics to see whether Ad Rank is the reason you aren’t getting premium placement.
This is especially useful when leadership asks, “Why aren’t we #1?” because you can separate “we’re not #1 due to rank” from “we’re not #1 due to budget” and from “we’re not #1 because the query mix and context make it unrealistic without overpaying.”
3) Use Auction Insights to see who’s beating you (and how often)
When you’re trying to understand Ad Rank in the real world, you need competitive context. Auction insights is where you’ll see who overlaps with you in the same auctions and how often they outrank you.
Two metrics I rely on constantly are:
Overlap rate, which helps you understand how often a specific competitor shows when you show (are you truly competing head-to-head, or only occasionally?), and Outranking share, which shows how often you rank higher than another advertiser (or show when they don’t) in the auctions you both enter.
If a competitor has a high overlap rate and you have a low outranking share versus them, your Ad Rank is not keeping pace in that pocket of auctions. That can be a bid gap, a quality gap, stronger assets/ad formats from the competitor, or simply that they’re better aligned to the intent of those queries.
4) Use the Ad Preview & Diagnosis tool to validate eligibility and troubleshoot “not showing” scenarios
If your real question behind “How do I check Ad Rank?” is actually “Why can’t I see my ad?”, the Ad Preview & Diagnosis tool is the right place to start. It lets you preview results and get diagnostics without artificially racking up impressions and skewing performance signals.
This tool won’t hand you an Ad Rank score. What it will do is show you whether your ad is appearing for a particular search context and, if it isn’t, it can provide diagnostic hints that often point back to Ad Rank realities—like insufficient rank to enter the auction, eligibility issues, or context mismatches (location, device, language, audience constraints, and so on).
5) Review Quality Score components (because they map directly to Ad Rank quality inputs)
Quality Score isn’t your Ad Rank, but it’s one of the cleanest windows into the quality side of Ad Rank. When you review Quality Score at the keyword level, don’t stop at the 1–10 number. The practical value comes from the components: expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, each graded relative to competitors.
If you’re losing impression share due to rank and one or more of these components are rated below average, you’ve found a quality lever that can improve Ad Rank without simply paying more. In mature accounts, that’s often the difference between sustainable growth and “bid inflation” that raises costs faster than results.
How to Improve Ad Rank After You’ve Checked the Signals (A Practical Fix Path)
Fix path A: If you’re losing due to rank, decide whether it’s a bid problem, a quality problem, or an assets problem
Ad Rank issues usually fall into one of three buckets: you’re not bidding enough to compete in that segment, your quality signals aren’t strong enough for the queries you’re trying to win, or your asset/ad format package isn’t competitive (which reduces expected impact and can weaken Ad Rank outcomes).
The fastest “triage” approach is to compare Lost IS (rank) with Quality Score components and top/absolute-top loss due to rank. If you have strong quality indicators but still lose heavily due to rank, it often points to a bid ceiling (or a strategic constraint like an overly conservative target CPA/ROAS). If quality indicators are weak, it’s usually more profitable to fix relevance and landing page experience before you push bids.
- When to raise bids: Quality indicators are solid, conversion rate is healthy, search terms are relevant, and you’re losing a meaningful share due to rank.
- When to rebuild relevance: Ad relevance is average/below average, CTR is soft, and the ad group contains mixed intent that forces generic messaging.
- When to improve assets: You’re eligible but prominence is inconsistent, and competitors are regularly showing with richer formats that make your result less compelling.
Fix path B: Improve ad relevance by tightening keyword-to-ad alignment
If Ad Rank is the symptom, misalignment is often the cause. The most reliable way to improve “auction-time quality” is to make sure the user’s intent, your keyword theme, your ad copy, and your landing page all agree with each other.
In practice, that often means splitting broad ad groups into tighter themes, writing ads that mirror the language of high-performing search terms, and ensuring the landing page makes the promise the ad makes (with fast load time and clear next steps). When that alignment improves, you typically see CTR lift first, then impression share and top-of-page presence improve as Ad Rank becomes more competitive.
Fix path C: Improve landing page experience with intent-matched content (not just “faster pages”)
Speed matters, but landing page experience is also about usefulness and relevance. If the query implies urgency, price shopping, or a need for proof, the page should meet that expectation immediately. When advertisers only optimize the page for aesthetics instead of intent, the quality side of Ad Rank tends to stall.
A simple standard: if a user lands and has to hunt for the exact product/service, pricing model, location coverage, or primary CTA, you’re likely paying an Ad Rank tax you don’t need to pay.
Fix path D: Use prominence metrics to avoid over-optimizing for “#1” when it doesn’t pay
Many teams chase absolute top placement because it’s visible and easy to talk about. But the goal isn’t “highest position,” it’s “most profitable position.” Use top and absolute-top impression metrics as a guide, then validate with conversion rate, cost per conversion, and incrementality. In plenty of accounts, a strong top-of-page presence (not necessarily absolute top) delivers the best efficiency—especially in competitive categories where the first position carries a steep CPC premium.
A final reality check: Ad Rank is auction-specific, so always segment before you decide
If you only check rank proxies at the campaign level, you can miss what’s really happening. Ad Rank limitations often show up in specific pockets: a device segment, a city, a daypart, a match type, or a subset of queries with more commercial intent (and therefore more competition).
Once you’ve confirmed you’re losing due to rank, segment your view before you “fix” anything. You’ll make better bid decisions, avoid unnecessary cost increases, and know exactly where relevance work will produce the biggest Ad Rank lift.
Let AI handle
the Google Ads grunt work
Let AI handle
the Google Ads grunt work
What Ad Rank Is (and Why You Can’t “Look Up” a Single Ad Rank Number)
In Google Ads, Ad Rank isn’t a static score you can pull up like a keyword bid or a Quality Score. It’s a set of values calculated in real time for each auction that determines two things: whether your ad is eligible to show at all, and if it is eligible, where it can show on the page relative to other advertisers.
That’s why many advertisers go hunting for an “Ad Rank” column and can’t find one. For most accounts, there is no single “Ad Rank” metric displayed in the interface because Ad Rank changes from search to search based on auction conditions.
Practically, Ad Rank is influenced by a mix of factors you control and factors you don’t. The controllable inputs include your bid, the quality of your ad and landing page experience, and the expected impact of assets (formerly extensions) and ad formats. The auction also applies Ad Rank thresholds, which can be higher for lower-quality ads, higher positions, certain query topics, and different user contexts like device and location.
The right mindset is: you don’t “check Ad Rank” directly—you diagnose it using the reporting and diagnostics that reveal whether you’re losing visibility due to rank (quality/bid/competition) versus budget or targeting.
How to Check Ad Rank Indirectly (The Methods That Actually Work)
1) Start with the clearest proxy: “Lost IS (rank)” and Impression Share
If you want the fastest, most actionable read on whether Ad Rank is holding you back, look at impression share and especially the lost impression share due to rank metrics. These don’t tell you “your Ad Rank is X,” but they do tell you how often you could have shown and didn’t because your Ad Rank wasn’t strong enough.
When “Lost IS (rank)” is high, you’re essentially being told: you were eligible to compete, but your ad didn’t win enough auctions. That’s an Ad Rank issue—typically bid, quality, assets/ad formats, or simply tougher competition in that segment.
Also note that impression share metrics are reported per campaign type (they aren’t rolled up into one universal number across your whole account), and they typically update with a short delay (commonly within 1–2 days). So use a meaningful date range and don’t overreact to today’s partial data.
- Diagnostic shortcut: If “Lost IS (rank)” is high and “Lost IS (budget)” is low, you have a rank limitation (not a budget limitation).
- Decision shortcut: If both are high, you have a two-part problem—budget caps are preventing participation in some auctions, and rank is losing others.
2) Check “Top” and “Absolute Top” metrics to understand where your Ad Rank is landing
It’s possible to show regularly and still feel “invisible” because you’re showing low on the page. That’s why I treat Ad Rank diagnosis as a two-step question: Are we showing? and Where are we showing when we do?
The top and absolute top metrics help you measure prominence. “Top” indicates impressions above the organic results (not necessarily the first ad). “Absolute top” indicates the very first ad position above the organic results. Pair these with the corresponding lost top/absolute top impression share (rank) metrics to see whether Ad Rank is the reason you aren’t getting premium placement.
This is especially useful when leadership asks, “Why aren’t we #1?” because you can separate “we’re not #1 due to rank” from “we’re not #1 due to budget” and from “we’re not #1 because the query mix and context make it unrealistic without overpaying.”
3) Use Auction Insights to see who’s beating you (and how often)
When you’re trying to understand Ad Rank in the real world, you need competitive context. Auction insights is where you’ll see who overlaps with you in the same auctions and how often they outrank you.
Two metrics I rely on constantly are:
Overlap rate, which helps you understand how often a specific competitor shows when you show (are you truly competing head-to-head, or only occasionally?), and Outranking share, which shows how often you rank higher than another advertiser (or show when they don’t) in the auctions you both enter.
If a competitor has a high overlap rate and you have a low outranking share versus them, your Ad Rank is not keeping pace in that pocket of auctions. That can be a bid gap, a quality gap, stronger assets/ad formats from the competitor, or simply that they’re better aligned to the intent of those queries.
4) Use the Ad Preview & Diagnosis tool to validate eligibility and troubleshoot “not showing” scenarios
If your real question behind “How do I check Ad Rank?” is actually “Why can’t I see my ad?”, the Ad Preview & Diagnosis tool is the right place to start. It lets you preview results and get diagnostics without artificially racking up impressions and skewing performance signals.
This tool won’t hand you an Ad Rank score. What it will do is show you whether your ad is appearing for a particular search context and, if it isn’t, it can provide diagnostic hints that often point back to Ad Rank realities—like insufficient rank to enter the auction, eligibility issues, or context mismatches (location, device, language, audience constraints, and so on).
5) Review Quality Score components (because they map directly to Ad Rank quality inputs)
Quality Score isn’t your Ad Rank, but it’s one of the cleanest windows into the quality side of Ad Rank. When you review Quality Score at the keyword level, don’t stop at the 1–10 number. The practical value comes from the components: expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, each graded relative to competitors.
If you’re losing impression share due to rank and one or more of these components are rated below average, you’ve found a quality lever that can improve Ad Rank without simply paying more. In mature accounts, that’s often the difference between sustainable growth and “bid inflation” that raises costs faster than results.
How to Improve Ad Rank After You’ve Checked the Signals (A Practical Fix Path)
Fix path A: If you’re losing due to rank, decide whether it’s a bid problem, a quality problem, or an assets problem
Ad Rank issues usually fall into one of three buckets: you’re not bidding enough to compete in that segment, your quality signals aren’t strong enough for the queries you’re trying to win, or your asset/ad format package isn’t competitive (which reduces expected impact and can weaken Ad Rank outcomes).
The fastest “triage” approach is to compare Lost IS (rank) with Quality Score components and top/absolute-top loss due to rank. If you have strong quality indicators but still lose heavily due to rank, it often points to a bid ceiling (or a strategic constraint like an overly conservative target CPA/ROAS). If quality indicators are weak, it’s usually more profitable to fix relevance and landing page experience before you push bids.
- When to raise bids: Quality indicators are solid, conversion rate is healthy, search terms are relevant, and you’re losing a meaningful share due to rank.
- When to rebuild relevance: Ad relevance is average/below average, CTR is soft, and the ad group contains mixed intent that forces generic messaging.
- When to improve assets: You’re eligible but prominence is inconsistent, and competitors are regularly showing with richer formats that make your result less compelling.
Fix path B: Improve ad relevance by tightening keyword-to-ad alignment
If Ad Rank is the symptom, misalignment is often the cause. The most reliable way to improve “auction-time quality” is to make sure the user’s intent, your keyword theme, your ad copy, and your landing page all agree with each other.
In practice, that often means splitting broad ad groups into tighter themes, writing ads that mirror the language of high-performing search terms, and ensuring the landing page makes the promise the ad makes (with fast load time and clear next steps). When that alignment improves, you typically see CTR lift first, then impression share and top-of-page presence improve as Ad Rank becomes more competitive.
Fix path C: Improve landing page experience with intent-matched content (not just “faster pages”)
Speed matters, but landing page experience is also about usefulness and relevance. If the query implies urgency, price shopping, or a need for proof, the page should meet that expectation immediately. When advertisers only optimize the page for aesthetics instead of intent, the quality side of Ad Rank tends to stall.
A simple standard: if a user lands and has to hunt for the exact product/service, pricing model, location coverage, or primary CTA, you’re likely paying an Ad Rank tax you don’t need to pay.
Fix path D: Use prominence metrics to avoid over-optimizing for “#1” when it doesn’t pay
Many teams chase absolute top placement because it’s visible and easy to talk about. But the goal isn’t “highest position,” it’s “most profitable position.” Use top and absolute-top impression metrics as a guide, then validate with conversion rate, cost per conversion, and incrementality. In plenty of accounts, a strong top-of-page presence (not necessarily absolute top) delivers the best efficiency—especially in competitive categories where the first position carries a steep CPC premium.
A final reality check: Ad Rank is auction-specific, so always segment before you decide
If you only check rank proxies at the campaign level, you can miss what’s really happening. Ad Rank limitations often show up in specific pockets: a device segment, a city, a daypart, a match type, or a subset of queries with more commercial intent (and therefore more competition).
Once you’ve confirmed you’re losing due to rank, segment your view before you “fix” anything. You’ll make better bid decisions, avoid unnecessary cost increases, and know exactly where relevance work will produce the biggest Ad Rank lift.
