What is wrong with position as a headline?
It’s an average across searches of wildly different value, it moves for reasons nobody in the room controls, and it says nothing about whether anyone did anything afterwards. It invites “so what?”, and search teams rarely have a good answer.
What should replace it?
Movement. How many visitors arrived unaware of the problem, how many were already weighing solutions, how many were close to deciding. And whether that mix is shifting. Then the paths they took: where they went on, and where they stopped.
Does that mean positions stop mattering?
No. They remain the working numbers for the team doing the work. They simply stop being the headline for the people funding it.
What about the work itself?
Report it as before and after. Record where a page stood the day work began, confirm the changes actually went live, and show what moved. Nothing forecast and nothing assumed. That’s the only kind of number a sceptical board should accept.