Google’s John Mueller has acknowledged limitations in Search Console’s reporting for AI-powered search, particularly when it comes to measuring a website’s position and visibility within AI-generated results. Mueller said the shortcomings reflect the growing complexity of modern search experiences, where traditional ranking positions no longer accurately describe how users encounter links.
Google Search Console Adds Generative AI Performance Reporting
Google announced its new Search Console generative AI performance report in June 2026, initially making it available to a subset of websites. The feature became globally accessible on August 31, 2026.
The report focuses largely on impressions, providing information about how often URLs appear across Google’s AI-powered search experiences, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
However, the generative AI report is a filtered view of data already included in the standard Search Console search performance report. That distinction is important because site owners should not add the AI figures to their regular Web search totals.
SEO Community Questions How AI Impressions Are Counted
A discussion on Reddit raised concerns that Search Console applies concepts developed for traditional search results — including impressions and positions — to AI Overviews in ways that may not accurately represent a website’s true visibility.
One issue involves impressions. A URL can receive an impression when it appears within an AI Overview even if the user does not scroll far enough to actually see the link.
Links placed behind a “Show More” interaction are handled differently. Because users must take an additional action to reveal those links, they generally do not receive an impression until the expanded content is opened.
The Reddit post explained:
“Google’s line is that standard impression rules apply to AI Overviews, which sounds like a non answer until you unpack what the standard rule actually is. It counts an impression when the item appears on the page of results that got served, whether or not it was scrolled into view. So no, the user doesn’t have to see it. If the AI Overview rendered and your link was in it, that’s an impression even if they never scrolled that far down.
Show More is the exception and it goes the other way. The standard rule carves out anything the user has to click to reveal, so links sitting behind that expansion don’t count until someone expands it. Those numbers are understating your exposure rather than inflating it.
Two other things about that report that catch people. Every link inside an AI Overview gets assigned the position of the AI Overview itself, so the average position you’re looking at is the slot the AIO occupied on the page, not where your link sat among the others in it. And the report is a filtered view of data already in your Web search type, not something sitting on top of it, so don’t add the two together.”
Mueller Acknowledges Difficulty Measuring AI Search Position
Mueller agreed with the assessment and acknowledged that reporting position data for AI search in a useful way remains difficult.
“This is pretty much it – we tried to document it as clearly as possible in the help center page (which you can find if you search for “impressions clicks search console”), it’s a giant doc in the meantime.
Position for these is hard to do in a way that makes it useful, so we’re currently tracking it like we do for many search features (as a block), & it’s not separated out in the Gen-AI performance report.”
AI Overviews Challenge Traditional Ranking Metrics
One of the central limitations is that links appearing within an AI Overview receive the position assigned to the AI Overview block itself. The metric therefore does not indicate where an individual website’s link appears among the sources cited within that AI-generated result.
That makes average position potentially less informative for SEO professionals accustomed to measuring rankings through the traditional list of organic search results.
Google Says the ‘Ten Blue Links’ Model No Longer Fits Search
Mueller also said modern Google Search offers significantly more ways for users to interact with results than the traditional list of ten organic links.
“Search results pages have a lot of ways for users to interact nowadays, so the old “position 1 – 10″ is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners. If any of you have thoughts on what would be useful in terms of tracking position, I’d love to hear & am happy to discuss with the team.”
Google Search has evolved for years beyond the conventional “ten blue links” format, adding featured snippets, knowledge panels, shopping results, video results, local listings and, more recently, generative AI experiences.
For publishers, marketers and SEO professionals, that evolution makes measuring visibility increasingly complicated. Search Console’s AI reporting offers additional insight into whether content appears in AI-driven experiences, but its position and impression metrics may not fully show how prominently individual links are presented to users.
As AI Overviews and AI Mode become a larger part of Google Search, the challenge for Google will be developing performance metrics that better reflect how users encounter, view and interact with individual sources inside generative search results.
John Irving writes for Bjournal, covering news, politics, business, technology, sport, entertainment, and lifestyle. He focuses on clear, reliable reporting and useful information, helping readers stay informed about current events, emerging trends, and stories that matter.
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