Field dictionary

The fields

Field	Definition	What it cannot support
Query	The words read, exactly as in the watch set	Nothing about related phrasings
Position	The slot the instrument reports for a result on its stored page	That any person saw the result in that slot
Type	Organic, map result, question box, or knowledge panel	Any judgement about which type matters more
Domain	The host of the ranking page	Anything about the business behind it
Domain rating	Ahrefs' 0 to 100 estimate of a domain's link profile strength	Quality, trust, relevance or size of business
Estimated traffic	Ahrefs' model of monthly organic visits to the ranking page	Actual visits, revenue, or enquiries
Reading date	The date the snapshot was read	That the results were the same the day before or after

Position

The most misread field on the site. Position here is the slot the instrument reports on a stored results page for Ireland. It is not what a person in Rathmines sees on a phone, and it is not what the same person sees in Swords. For map results in particular, real position varies with the searcher's location, and this instrument reads from one notional point, so it cannot see that variation at all. Where a page here says a domain was at position three, it means the instrument reported it at position three, and nothing more.

Domain rating

A link-profile estimate. It is included because it makes the shape of a results page legible at a glance, and it is worth knowing that in the first observation pages with a rating of zero outranked pages rated in the forties and seventies on three of the four queries. That is the field arguing against its own importance, which is a good reason to keep printing it.

Estimated traffic

A model, not a count. It estimates monthly organic visits to the specific ranking page from all its keywords, not from the query being read. A page can show high estimated traffic and receive almost none of it from the query in the reading.

Empty cells

An empty cell means the instrument reported nothing for that field. It does not mean zero. Map results routinely have no domain rating or traffic reported, and those cells stay blank rather than being filled with a guess.

Where these definitions govern

Everywhere on this site, and anywhere else in the network that quotes a figure from this log. Where another property's wording is looser than this page, this page is right and the other is corrected, under the rule set out on the protocol.