Google’s John Mueller answered a question about search console reporting’s inadequacies, defending the shortcomings as based on the inherent complexity of AI search itself.
Google Search Console Search Generative AI Performance Reports
The new Search Console report was announced in June 2026, initially rolling out to a “subset” of websites then fully accessible globally on August 31, 2026.
The report primarily focuses on impressions, showing how many times a URL appears in AI search surfaces, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. The data is filtered, meaning that the values shown are already included in the regular search performance report.
Post On Reddit
Someone posted on Reddit that Search Console’s AI Overviews metrics follow the ten blue link legacy concepts of impressions and positions, providing what the Redditor described as an inaccurate snapshot of a website’s performance.
Their main points were:
- AI Overviews impression metrics don’t necessarily mean the user actually saw the link.
- Links hidden behind “Show More” are treated differently and could potentially have more exposure than GSC reports.
- The position metric measures the position of the AI Overviews display, not the link.
- A general comment that the Gen-AI report is a filtered view, not broken out.
The Redditor’s overall takeaway is that the AI Overviews metrics can be misleading if SEOs or site owners review it
This is how they explained it:
“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.”
Hard To Usefully Report AI Search Visibility
Google’s John Mueller answered that he agreed with the Redditor’s assessment of Search Console’s search performance report that’s filtered for AI search and confirmed that it’s hard to do it in a way that’s useful.
His response:
“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.”
Stop Thinking In Terms of Ten Links
Mueller continued his answer to say that search is a lot more than the ten blue links and that it’s hard to map that paradigm to the way the reality of how search is today.
He continued:
“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.”
The takeaway there is that yes, the ten blue links is no longer the reality and that’s been the case for many years. But for some reason, Google continues to approach search console in a way that kind of tries to map it to impression type data that isn’t entirely successful with AI search and apparently they don’t currently know a better way to do it.
Takeaways
- Search Console’s AI search reporting is configured around legacy ten blue link-era concepts that do not fit modern search.
- AI Overviews can count an impression even when a user never actually saw the link, thus overstating a URLs actual visibility in AI search surfaces.
- Search Console can understate a site’s presence in AI Overviews when it is hidden behind a “Show More” link because that presence is not counted until the link is expanded. And yet that’s useful information to a site owner or an SEO.
- Search Console’s position reporting for AI search tracks the position of the AI feature as a block, not the position of an individual link within it. That’s in contradiction with what matters for SEO, the position of the link itself.
- Mueller essentially confirmed that the generative AI performance report is inadequate and that Google does not have a better solution yet.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/BestForBest
