Operations · document 22

Cross-provider Performance

In the workspace: /cross-provider-performance

Availability

Included on Advanced

This document is open to every reader on every plan. Availability tells you what a plan includes; it does not decide what you may read.

What it is for

Clicks, impressions and position from Google, Bing and Yandex, on one screen and deliberately not added together. The reason to look here rather than at three provider dashboards is the comparison of evidence, not the convenience: seeing how differently three engines describe the same site is usually more informative than any single one of their numbers.

How to use it

Connect and match the providers you want compared. A provider you have not connected is absent from the page rather than shown as zero.
Choose the date range you want. Read what each provider does with it before you draw a conclusion from the figures.
Read the methodology notes at the top once. They explain why the columns are not comparable, and everything below them depends on that.
Compare each provider against its own previous period, not against the other providers.

Reading the result

Each provider panel states its own window and scope, and they differ in kind. Google reports the exact range you asked for, across the whole property. Bing chooses its own window and accepts no requested range. Yandex returns a ranked sample of popular queries, which is not whole-site volume and must not be read as one. A position figure means something different at each of the three, which is why the label names the provider metric rather than saying position.

What it cannot tell you

There is no combined score and there never will be, because a total built from three different definitions would be a number that describes nothing. A provider that fails to answer shows its error and leaves the other panels valid rather than taking the page down. And none of this attributes a change to a cause: it tells you visibility moved, not which release moved it.

What it keeps

Nothing. Every figure is fetched from the providers when you open the page, because they revise their own numbers for days afterwards and a stored copy would be wrong in a way nobody could see.