On September 10, 2026, Zyppy published the 2026 Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey — Cyrus Shepard and Dawn Shepard collected 13,665 ranking-factor data points from more than 100 SEO practitioners, and Search Engine Land put the respondent count at 131. The same morning, Google’s John Mueller told r/SEO that “the old ‘position 1 – 10’ is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners.”
The industry read the first one and shrugged at the second. The survey got summarized as a to-do list — write relevant content, build backlinks, improve quality. Mueller’s comment got filed as a Search Console footnote. It is the more consequential of the two, because it says the number most Michigan marketing teams report to leadership every month has stopped meaning what it used to mean.
What did the 2026 Ranking Factors Expert Survey actually measure?
It measured expert opinion, not Google’s systems. Nobody at Zyppy tested a live ranking model; practitioners were asked to weight factors, and the percentages are the aggregated weights of those beliefs.
The top tier came out as content relevance at 57.1%, backlinks at 54.8%, and content quality at 47.6%. The middle sat at trust and authority (36.5%), behavioral click signals (29.4%), and brand presence (27.0%). Below 20%: user satisfaction, technical SEO, topical authority, and internal linking.
That bottom tier is worth arguing with. Technical SEO did not score low because it stopped mattering. It scored low because surveys of this shape ask what differentiates winners from losers, and a site with broken canonicals or an unreachable faceted catalog never enters the comparison set at all. Experts were rating tiebreakers among sites that already passed the entrance exam. A Warren industrial distributor whose 4,000 SKU pages are reachable only through a JavaScript filter is not losing on backlinks.
Why did Google say the old “position 1-10” is hard to map?
Because a results page no longer has ten ordered slots. Mueller was answering a question about how impressions are counted for generative AI in Search Console, and his full reply explained that Google currently tracks those placements “like we do for many search features (as a block),” and that position “is not separated out in the Gen-AI performance report.”
He also asked practitioners what position tracking should look like. Google is not defending the current metric — it is saying the old one is a poor fit and a replacement does not exist yet.
How does “tracked as a block” change your average position number?
Block tracking means every link inside a feature inherits the position of the feature, not its own rank within it. If your page is the seventh citation inside an AI Overview, and that AI Overview sits at the top of the page, your reported position is roughly 1 — not 7.
Run that mechanism forward and it predicts cases nobody has written up. Take a Livonia contract manufacturer holding a steady fourth-position blue link for “cnc machining tolerances” that gets absorbed into an AI Overview citation instead. Average position improves from about 4.0 to about 1.0. Clicks fall, because most of the answer now renders above the link. Impressions may climb, because AI Overview appearances generate impressions the classic listing never did. Every headline number moves the direction a marketer wants, and the business gets fewer quote requests.
The reverse also holds, and it is the version that gets people fired. A page that loses an AI Overview citation and reverts to an ordinary eighth-place listing will show average position collapsing from 1.2 to 8.0 in a single week, with no ranking change in the traditional sense whatsoever. We walked through the same class of false signal in our look at diagnosing a traffic drop that isn’t a ranking drop, and the diagnostic discipline is identical here.
Does a rising average position mean your SEO is working?
No. As of September 2026 an improving average position is as likely to mean you were absorbed into a block as it is to mean you outranked someone. The metric is now a blend of two incompatible things — where a blue link sat, and where a container sat — averaged into one figure with no way to separate them inside the report.
This is where the two September 10 stories collide. Accept the survey’s framing and you spend Q4 chasing backlinks and content relevance — those matter — but you grade the work with a dependent variable Google said the same day it cannot make useful. That is how a small team spends two quarters of budget and cannot say afterward whether it worked.
Why does this hit Michigan B2B suppliers harder than most?
Because the distortion scales with how much of your funnel is research rather than transaction. Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers around Auburn Hills, Sterling Heights, and Portage sell into buying cycles measured in months, where a buyer runs a dozen specification and tolerance queries before anyone fills out a form. Those informational queries are the ones AI Overviews and AI Mode absorb most aggressively, so a supplier’s funnel is block-tracked at the top while the bottom — branded searches, “request a quote,” part-number lookups — stays classic.
The result is an account-wide average that mixes a distorted top with an undistorted bottom and moves for reasons unrelated to the work. Consumer-facing businesses feel less of it: a Grand Rapids dentist’s “dentist near me” traffic runs through the local pack, which behaved as a block long before any of this.
How should a small Michigan marketing team re-baseline its reporting?
A three-person team can finish this in a week. None of it requires a platform purchase.
- Demote average position to a diagnostic. Remove it from the top row of your leadership report. It stays in the account for investigation; it stops being a headline.
- Promote clicks per impression on a fixed query set. Pick 40 to 60 queries that actually drive revenue, freeze the list, and track click-through rate on that fixed set month over month. A frozen set cannot be gamed by query mix drift.
- Split the Search Console generative AI performance report from the classic report. Google rolled the Gen-AI report out globally this year. Never blend the two into one trend line — they count different surfaces.
- Export your full 16-month Search Console history now. The Performance report holds a rolling 16 months. Once that window slides past your pre-AI-Mode months, the comparison is gone permanently. A CSV costs nothing.
- Add a conversion-per-1,000-impressions column. This is the one figure that survives the metric change intact, because it ties an outcome to an exposure without routing through rank.
- Fix the sub-20% factors first. Crawlable faceted navigation, clean canonicals, internal links from category hubs into deep spec pages. Block-level retrieval pulls passages from wherever it can reach on your site, which makes internal linking more load-bearing than the survey’s ranking of it implies, not less.
- Write one direct answer per page, above the fold. Two to three sentences that resolve the page’s core question before any elaboration. That is the passage a generative surface can lift; buried answers get skipped.
Step one is the one teams resist, because average position is the number executives recognize. Replace it in the same meeting you remove it, or it comes back.
What dates should be on the Q4 calendar?
- September 30, 2026 — Q3 close. Export Search Console and set Q4 targets against click-based metrics, not position.
- Through September 2026 — Google Ads removes campaign-level language targeting for Search campaigns and the Search Network portion of Performance Max, per the Google Ads Developer Blog. Paid reporting shifts the same quarter your organic reporting does.
- September 2026 onward — Google has begun in-account notices pushing Dynamic Search Ads toward AI Max. Treat comparisons spanning that switch as two datasets.
- October 30, 2026 — Google’s updated personalized advertising policy takes effect for YouTube inventory, permitting alcohol personalization where locally allowed. Relevant to Michigan’s craft beverage advertisers in Kalamazoo and Traverse City.
- Late January 2027 — the rolling 16-month Search Console window closes on September 2025, the last clean pre-AI-Mode comparison period for most accounts.
Frequently asked questions
Is the 2026 Ranking Factors Expert Survey worth reading at all?
Yes, as a map of practitioner consensus rather than a specification of Google’s systems. Its real value is the spread: content relevance at 57.1% against internal linking under 20% tells you where the industry is currently spending attention. Whether that allocation is correct is a separate question, and on technical factors we think consensus is underweighting the work.
Should we stop tracking rankings entirely?
No — stop reporting a single blended average as a performance headline. Rank data is still useful for competitive checks on specific high-value queries and for spotting sudden losses. The failure mode is aggregating it across a whole account and presenting the result as a score, when half the underlying values are now block positions.
How do we tell a block absorption from a real ranking loss?
Look at impressions and clicks together. Absorption usually shows flat or rising impressions with falling clicks and an improving position. A real ranking loss shows falling impressions, falling clicks, and a worsening position in the same direction. Our guide to telling a reporting glitch from a ranking problem applies the same three-signal check.
Does any of this change what we should publish?
Modestly. Keep publishing for the buyer, but structure each page so a single passage answers the page’s question outright near the top, and make sure deep technical pages are internally linked and crawlable. Those two changes serve classic ranking and block-level retrieval at once, which is the only sensible bet while Google works out what position should even mean.
The judgment call
The survey is not wrong. It is answering a 2019 question in 2026 — which levers move rank, asked at a moment when the platform operating the rank says rank is hard to express usefully. Michigan suppliers with two-person marketing teams have no slack for a metric that moves for reasons unrelated to their work. Demote the number, freeze a query set, measure conversions against impressions.
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