Google says Search Console cannot show useful positions for AI search

Google’s John Mueller said on 10 September that Search Console cannot map the old position 1 to 10 scale onto AI search results in a way that helps site owners. He was answering a question in the r/SEO forum on Reddit about how impressions are counted for generative AI features.

Mueller wrote that the “old ‘position 1 – 10’ is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners”. Search pages now give readers many ways to interact, so one rank number no longer describes where a link sat. Google therefore tracks these features the way it tracks other search features, such as image packs.

An AI Overview counts as one block, not ten ranked links

The position in the report belongs to the whole AI Overview, not to each link inside it. Two sites quoted in the same answer box get the same number. Nothing in Search Console tells you whether your link came first or fifth inside that box. Google finished the worldwide rollout of AI Overviews reporting earlier this year, and this is the limit that came with it.

Impressions are counted even when nobody saw the link

An impression is recorded when the block appears, even if the reader never scrolled to the link. Links hidden behind “Show more” work the other way: they count only after someone expands the box. So the same report overstates visibility in one place and understates it in another.

The AI numbers also sit inside the normal performance report

Data for AI Mode and AI Overviews is filtered out for its own view, but it is already part of the standard search performance totals. Adding the two together double counts. That matters for anyone building a monthly report, because the headline impression figure can look like growth that never happened.

Mueller asked site owners what a better metric would look like

He closed by inviting ideas on what position tracking would actually be useful. Google has no replacement ready. Publishers are measuring the same shift in their own way: Le Monde says it sees no drop in readers from AI answers. Others report the opposite, and Search Console will not settle the argument. The 131 SEOs who put relevance ahead of links in a recent survey are working from the same thin data.

Open the performance report, filter to the AI Mode search appearance and line up impressions against clicks for your 20 strongest pages. The gap is the part Search Console cannot explain. Treat the position column as a marker of where the box sat, not where you sat inside it, and keep a separate note of pages that gained impressions but no clicks.