What striking distance means
A striking-distance keyword is a query that one of your pages already ranks for, just outside the top results. A common range is an average position between about 8 and 20, though the range is a convention, not a Google term. The page already gets impressions for the query, so a small move up can bring clicks without a new page.
Search Console is the right source because it reports the queries your own pages appeared for, with real impressions, clicks and average position.
What you need
- A Search Console property with a few months of data.
- An AI app that supports MCP servers, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Codex or Cursor.
- A Search Console MCP server. This guide uses QuerySail's hosted Google Search Console MCP server. Setup takes about five minutes, and the steps for each app are in how to connect Search Console to ChatGPT and Claude.
Four steps
1. Pull queries and pages
For sc-domain:example.com, get clicks, impressions, CTR and average position by query and page for the last 28 days. Page through the results until you have 500 rows.
Tool: get_performance
With no dates, the tool uses the last 28 finalized days and says which dates it used. Each call returns up to 100 rows, and your assistant pages through more with the cursor it gets back.
2. Keep the striking-distance rows
From those rows, keep queries with an average position between 8 and 20 and at least 100 impressions. Sort them by impressions and show a table.
No tool call. Your assistant filters the rows it already has.
The Search Console API filters by query, page, country, device and search appearance, not by position or impressions. Your assistant applies those limits to the rows it fetched.
3. Check the pages behind them
Inspect the 10 pages in that table. Are they indexed, and is Google's chosen canonical the same as the declared one?
Tool: inspect_urls
URL Inspection checks up to 20 URLs of one property per call. A page that is not indexed, or that Google folds into another canonical, needs that fixed before any content change helps.
4. Measure the change later
Compare clicks, impressions and average position for pages containing /guides/pricing-tips over the last 28 days with the 28 days before.
Tool: compare_performance
Run it a few weeks after you change a page. The comparison returns both periods' totals, the click change split into impressions and CTR, and the queries that gained or lost the most.
Example result
Made-up example. We invented these numbers to show the shape of a result. They do not come from a real site or a QuerySail customer. For sc-domain:example.com, September 18 to October 15, 2026, 31 query and page pairs had an average position between 8 and 20 and at least 100 impressions. The top three by impressions were "pricing tips for bakeries" on /guides/pricing-tips (2,140 impressions, position 11.4, CTR 0.006), "how to price cupcakes" on the same page (1,310 impressions, position 9.2, CTR 0.011) and "bakery profit margin" on /blog/margins (980 impressions, position 14.8, CTR 0.002).
QuerySail reports CTR as a fraction, so 0.011 is 1.1%.
Decide what to change
Ask your assistant to group the rows by page, so you work on one page at a time. For each page, check:
- Whether the title and description use the words people search for.
- Whether the page answers the query near the top, or only in passing.
- Whether other pages on your site link to it with descriptive text.
- Whether two of your pages show up for the same query. If so, decide which one should rank.
The data shows where pages rank, not why. Treat your assistant's suggestions as ideas to test, and change one page at a time so you can measure the result.
Limits of the data
- Average position. Google averages the page's top position across all impressions for that row, so a position of 11 can mean the page moves between page one and page two.
- Top rows only. Google returns only top rows for query and page breakdowns and leaves out rare queries. A missing query may still have impressions.
- History. Search Console keeps about the last 16 months.
- Usage. Each call returns up to 100 rows, and QuerySail allows 2,000 requests a day. Fair-use limits are on the pricing page.