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Just to be clear, and honestly, I am surprised so many people do not know this, but the featured snippet change from the other day has no impact on the Google Search Console performance reports. That report only counts the top-most result anyway, so the lower results on the page did not count anyway.
So many people were asking Google about how this impacts those reports, Google had to respond to that question numerous times.
Google wrote on Twitter "For those asking, this causes no change in Search Console performance reports. We only log the topmost appearance of a URL as its position. Featured snippets were already counted, duplicate appearances were not. See also: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828."
For those asking, this causes no change in Search Console performance reports. We only log the topmost appearance of a URL as its position. Featured snippets were already counted, duplicate appearances were not. See also: https://t.co/7nR7CfWd2S
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 23, 2020
John Mueller from Google also responded to these types of questions:
The average position is based on the topmost ranking per query, so this wouldn't change.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 23, 2020
But third-party tools, at least some of them, do need to update. Many of those do not calculate featured snippets as part of the ten blue links. So those tools need to update its reporting and communication around how it will report on these going forward.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
