Search Console's AI Overview numbers do not measure what they appear to measure, and Google said so in public this month.
On 13 September, Search Engine Journal reported a Reddit thread in which Google's John Mueller agreed with a site owner's breakdown of how the generative AI performance report counts. Search Engine Watch covered it the next day. The rules themselves are written down in Google's own help page on impressions, position and clicks. What changed is Google saying out loud that they do not produce a useful answer to the question most people open the report to ask.
Mueller's words: "Position for these is hard to do in a way that makes it useful."
The position belongs to the box
Google's documentation treats an AI Overview as one result occupying one position. Every link inside it is assigned that same position.
So if an AI Overview cites five sources, the first and the fifth report identical positions. A better average position can mean the AI Overview moved up the page. It cannot tell you that your citation moved up inside it. The number describes the container, not your place in it.
Impressions miss in both directions
AI Overviews follow the standard impression rules. As the thread Mueller endorsed put it, an impression counts when the result is on the page that was served, whether or not anyone scrolled to it. That inflates exposure.
Links hidden behind the expansion are the opposite case. They are not counted until someone expands the answer. That understates exposure.
The chart shows one line. It does not show which of the two errors dominates for your pages.
Do not add it to your Web totals
The AI report is a filtered view of data already inside the Web search type, not a separate layer on top of it. Adding the two double counts. Dividing all Web clicks by AI impressions produces a number that looks like an AI click-through rate and is not one. The AI report carries no click data of its own.
What the report is still good for
It answers presence questions well: which of your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, in which countries, and how that changes over time. It does not answer prominence questions: how visible your citation was, or whether it earned the visit.
When the report finished rolling out, we argued that its first readings should be written down with a date rather than treated as a verdict. This is the second half of that argument. Even a clean reading is a reading of presence.
How to read it
- Read position as the position of the AI Overview, never as yours inside it.
- Read an impression as "was on the page", not "was seen".
- Keep the AI report out of any sum with Web totals.
- For prominence, look at the answer itself. Run the query, read what comes back, and record where you are cited and in what order. That is the manual half of measuring AI visibility, and it is still the only way to see order inside the answer.
Mueller invited suggestions for a better position metric. Neither report mentions a replacement or a date. Until one ships, the report tells you that you were in the answer. It does not tell you how well you were placed.
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