Google's John Mueller says Search Console's AI Overviews report is inadequate and cannot separate individual link positions

Search Engine Journal reports that Google's John Mueller has confirmed on r/SEO that Search Console's Gen-AI performance report does not separate the position of individual links inside an AI Overview, and that Google has no better way to track it yet. The Reddit exchange and Mueller's reply were published to the subreddit and covered by Search Engine Journal on 13 September.

What the report actually counts

The Reddit poster laid out three ways the Gen-AI report reads differently from a classical Search Console line. An AI Overview counts as an impression when it renders on the results page, whether or not the user ever scrolls it into view, which follows the same rule Search Console uses for every other feature. Links hidden behind the Show More expansion inside an AI Overview go the other way: they are not counted as impressions until someone opens the expansion, so those numbers understate exposure rather than inflate it. And every link inside an AI Overview is assigned the same position, the position of the block itself, not where that link sits among the other citations.

Mueller's reply

Mueller answered the thread directly. On the position rule, he wrote that "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", according to Search Engine Journal's transcription of the comment. He added that the ten-blue-links model no longer describes the results page, that mapping "position 1 to 10" to modern search is hard, and that if anyone has ideas for a more useful position metric he would like to hear them.

Search Engine Journal reads this as a working acknowledgement rather than a fix. Google has documented the impression and position rules in the Search Console help centre, but the shape of the Gen-AI report follows the shape of the classical search-performance report, and that shape does not describe an AI Overview well.

What the report also does not add up to

One more thing the article flags: the Gen-AI performance report is a filtered slice of the same data that already appears in the Web search type, not a second data source on top of it. Adding the two totals together double-counts, and a search-visibility dashboard built on that arithmetic is measuring the same impression twice.

What it changes for teams building AI-visibility dashboards

Any dashboard that reads Search Console and reports a position for a URL inside AI Overviews is currently reading the position of the AI Overview block, not the URL. Any impression count for AI Overviews is counting rendered impressions rather than seen impressions. Any team combining the Gen-AI slice with the Web search totals is inflating its own numbers. Mueller's reply is the closest thing to guidance on record and says the tool does not yet produce the number a site owner actually wants. Reporting AI-search visibility honestly right now means naming those limits in the same dashboard, and pairing Search Console with a source that measures link-level position by fetching AI Overviews directly.

Source

• Search Engine Journal: Google Admits Search Console Reporting For AI Search Is Inadequate, 13 September 2026, by Roger Montti
• Mueller's reply on r/SEO: comment thread