← Glossary
What is Ad Rank?
Ad Rank determines the position of your ad, combining your bid with your Quality Score and your ad assets.
The practical consequence is that the highest bidder does not automatically win. An advertiser bidding less with a far more relevant ad routinely outranks one bidding more with a generic one.
Ad assets — sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets — feed into Ad Rank too, at no extra cost per click. It's the cheapest available improvement to position, and the one most small advertisers skip.
Because relevance is multiplied against bid rather than added to it, improving Quality Score can simultaneously raise your position and lower your cost, which no amount of extra bidding can do.