average position measure on GSC

Could someone explain how this really works?

Because sometimes I just don’t get it.

Ahrefs shows my main keyword in positions 1 -3 most of the month.

I also check manually with a VPN using a location, and I see the same positions 1-3 day by day.

But when I check the GSC report, the average position shows around 6.0-6.6.

How STRONG can the GSC number be reliable?

it's a known fact that GSC is both delayed, and misleading (I think google intentionally skews some metrics inside of the GSC to keep people deceived, but I obviously can't prove it... nor do I care to prove it to be honest, I just put the info out there, whoever wants to believe it they will, otherwise we move on...)

And it's also true that the avg. position of 6.0-6.6 that you're seeing takes into accounts multiple things, such as:

- both the mobile rankings and the desktop rankings
- both the organic search and other channels (Google Discovery I think is included here)
- also other stuff that I don't remember, but which I know it's included because I've read about it...

I think Ahrefs (and other SEO tools) only give you the rankings for the SERPs on desktop computers, they don't include all of those elements that GSC includes, which is why we see such differences. I've read an article a few years ago that explained these things and that's how I know them, but I can't remember which article it was. Probably one of the big SEO sites (SEL, SEJ, etc) as I was frequenting those sites a lot back then, but I can't remember

Anyway, that's why there are differences between SEO tools and GSC...

GSC shows the true average from every search your page appears in, so even if you rank 1–3 for main keywords, other lower impressions pull the number down.