On 10 September 2026, John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, replied to a thread on the r/SEO forum about how Search Console counts impressions from generative AI results. His answer went further than the usual help-doc restatement. Mueller confirmed that position reporting for AI search surfaces is tracked as a single block, is not broken out in the generative AI performance report, and that Google does not currently have a better way to present it. He then asked the community what would actually be useful, and said he was happy to take suggestions back to the team.
That is a notable admission from Google. The company spent the summer rolling out a report that appears, at first glance, to be a dedicated AI visibility dashboard. Mueller's comments confirm it is narrower than the name suggests, and that the most familiar SEO metric of all, average position, has no meaningful equivalent inside it.
What Mueller said
The thread started with a detailed critique of the generative AI performance report. The original poster argued that the report reuses ten-blue-link concepts that no longer fit. Impressions, for example, can be counted for a link the user never scrolled to, while links hidden behind a "Show More" expansion are not counted at all until someone clicks. Position, meanwhile, reflects where the AI Overview block sits on the results page rather than where an individual link sits inside it. The report is also a filtered view of data already present in the standard performance report, so the two should not be added together.
Mueller agreed with that reading and described the reporting problem from Google's side. On position, he wrote: "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." He added that results pages now offer many ways for users to interact, which makes the old "position 1 – 10" hard to map or make useful for site owners, and closed by inviting feedback: "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."
The practical takeaway is that no replacement metric exists yet. Google is not hiding one. It has not settled on one.
What the report actually measures
The official documentation makes the shape of the gap clear. The Generative AI performance report for Search, announced on the Google Search Central blog on 3 June 2026 and extended to all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026, shows impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode broken down by page, country, device, and date. The help center page lists no click data, no query data, and no position data, and it does not separate AI Overviews from AI Mode. The report also only appears once a site clears a minimum threshold of impressions in those features.
Impressions themselves are defined inconsistently across surfaces. The general help page on impressions, position, and clicks states that an impression is normally counted whenever an item appears in the current page of results, whether or not it is scrolled into view, provided the user does not have to click to see more results. Inside expanding sections such as an FAQ result, or inside a scrolling carousel, the item must be expanded or scrolled into view to register. For infinite-scrolling surfaces like Discover, the link must be scrolled into view, and only one impression is counted per result per session.
There is a second inconsistency worth noting. The Discover version of the generative AI report is explicit that a link must be scrolled into view, while the Search version simply says impressions are "how many times links to your site were shown to a user." So the same word means different things depending on whether the AI answer sits on a search results page or in a Discover feed.
On position, the documentation is blunt. An AI Overview occupies one position on the page, and every link inside it inherits that same position value. AI Mode is measured using the methodology of a standard results page. The result is an average position figure that tells you where the AI block appeared, not how your citation ranked among the other sources inside it.
Why this matters for AI search reporting
The generative AI report arrived with regulatory pressure in the background. It was first released to a subset of sites, reportedly including UK properties, as the UK competition authority was pressing Google on search transparency, and it went global on the same date the Search generative AI opt-out control did. Against that backdrop, a report that tracks AI impressions but cannot tell you how a citation is positioned is a partial instrument, and Mueller has now said so in public.
The timing also matters because AI answers are spreading across the results page. Independent tool vendors reported in early September that the overwhelming majority of People Also Ask answers now appear to be AI-generated, up sharply from a year earlier. Analysts see this as a second block selected by AI, sitting alongside AI Overviews, with no rank from one to ten attached to it. When two or more of these blocks can appear above the organic list, a flat average position curve can coexist with falling clicks, and the report that most teams open first will show nothing unusual.
The mechanics explain why. Clicks from links inside an AI Overview or AI Mode are folded into the standard performance report and mixed with organic clicks. There is no separate click line for AI surface traffic. If your average position is stable and your clicks are declining, the gap between those two numbers is where the answer is being given before anyone reaches the blue links, and Search Console currently cannot attribute that movement to a specific AI citation.
What SEO and GEO practitioners should do now
The honest answer is that no single Search Console number replaces average position for AI visibility. Teams need to layer several sources and read them by page rather than by site.
Read the generative AI report by page, not by totals. A site-level impression count tells you almost nothing. Page-level impressions tell you which URLs are surfacing in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and country and device breakdowns reveal where an answer is appearing. Treat a rising AI impression count on a page as a signal to inspect what that page currently says, because an AI feature is choosing to reference it.
Watch the divergence between impressions and clicks. A page with stable or rising impressions and falling clicks is the signature of an answer being delivered on the results page. Pull those pages monthly, and cross-reference them against the AI report to see whether they are also picking up AI impressions. The pair of numbers is far more informative than either one alone.
Budget for query-panel measurement. Neither Search Console nor Google Analytics can tell you the share of AI answers that name your brand. That requires replaying a fixed panel of queries on a regular cadence against Google, plus the assistants your audience actually uses such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and recording whether your brand is cited. This is the only way to see citation share as a trend instead of guessing from raw traffic.
Keep average position for what it still does well. It remains a reasonable way to compare two pages competing for the same query in the standard results. It stops being useful when it is used as a proxy for overall visibility, which is exactly the mistake Mueller's comments expose.
Answer the open question. Mueller explicitly asked for input on what would be useful for tracking position. Site owners and agencies have a rare opening to shape the metric itself, through Search Console's feedback form or the Search Central Community. If you want per-link position inside AI Overviews, or a separate clicks line for AI surfaces, that is the moment to say so, with concrete examples of the reporting decisions it would unblock.
The bottom line
Google has shipped an AI performance report that shows whether your pages appear in generative search, and has now confirmed it cannot show how they rank within it. Mueller's comments are a clarity win wrapped in a capability gap. The metric most SEO teams report on was designed for a results page that no longer exists in its original form, and Google is still working out what should replace it.
For now, the workable approach is triangulation: page-level AI impressions from Search Console, page-level clicks from the standard report, a recurring query panel to measure citation share, and business outcomes as the final check. None of those is a ranking position inside an AI answer. Until Google ships one, pretending the current number means something more is the real reporting risk.
Sources
- Google Search Central Blog, "Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console" (3 June 2026; worldwide rollout note dated 31 August 2026): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports
- Google Search Console Help, "Generative AI performance report (Search)": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139
- Google Search Console Help, "Generative AI performance report (Discover)": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16983858
- Google Search Console Help, "What are impressions, position, and clicks?": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828
- John Mueller's comments on r/SEO, "Google Says The Old Position 1–10 Is Hard To Map" (10 September 2026): https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1wcjlbj/googlesaystheoldposition110ishardto_map/
- AIxH, "Google admits the old position 1 to 10 has become hard to make useful" (11 September 2026): https://www.aixh.com/en/news/google-position-1-10-hard-to-map-search-console/
