Search Console's generative AI performance report does not tell site owners where their links appear inside AI Overviews, and Google says it has no solution yet. Google Search Central Senior Search Analyst John Mueller acknowledged the limitation in a Reddit thread this week, confirming the report tracks the position of the AI Overview block as a whole, not the position of individual links within it.
What the Generative AI Performance Report Currently Measures
Google introduced the Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console in June 2026, designed to give site owners dedicated views of their impressions within generative AI features including AI Overviews and AI Mode. The initial rollout began on June 3 with a select group of UK website owners. As of August 31, 2026, Google confirmed the reports had rolled out to all websites worldwide.
The reporting includes impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, but does not include click data. This data is included in the overall performance report, where it continues to be tracked to give site owners an overview of their site's overall visibility in Google Search. That filtered structure means the numbers in the generative AI report are a subset of figures already present in the standard Web search performance report; they cannot be added together without double-counting.
How Impression Counting Works, and Where It Falls Short
A Reddit post this week laid out four specific ways in which the report's methodology diverges from what most SEOs expect. Mueller replied to the thread, describing the summary as accurate.
The first issue concerns what triggers an impression. An AI Overview impression is counted when the answer appears on the served results page, even if the user never scrolled it into view. A link can register as an impression without having been visible to the user.
The second issue runs in the opposite direction. Links behind a "Show more" expansion element are counted only when a user clicks to expand them, as confirmed by Mueller in a July 1, 2026 Bluesky post. That means exposure hidden behind the expansion goes unrecorded, understating how often a site's content is surfaced within an AI Overview.
The third issue is the position metric itself. Mueller confirmed that Search Console gives every link inside an AI Overview the position of the AI Overview block itself. The reported figure describes where the AI Overview appeared on the page, position 1, 3, or wherever the feature rendered, not where a given link sat among the other citations inside the response.
The generative AI report is a filtered view of Web search data, meaning its impressions must not be added to Web search totals.
Mueller's Response: Position Reporting Is "Hard to Do in a Way That Makes It Useful"
Mueller wrote in the Reddit thread: "This is pretty much it — we tried to document it as clearly as possible in the help center page... 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), and it's not separated out in the Gen-AI performance report."
Mueller said the old position 1–10 model is hard to map to modern results pages and asked for community suggestions, but announced no change or timeline. He wrote: "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."
Mueller directed users to Google's help center article on how impressions, clicks, and position are counted, describing it as "a giant doc in the meantime."
What This Means for Measuring AI Search Visibility
For SEOs and site owners using the generative AI performance report, the practical effect of these measurement decisions is meaningful. Impression volume in the report does not confirm that a user saw a link. The average position figure reflects the placement of the AI Overview feature on the page, not the link's rank within the AI response itself. And because the report is a filtered view of existing Web search data, combining its totals with standard performance report numbers will produce inflated figures.
Google's June 2026 announcement stated it would "introduce additional metrics over time," but as of September 2026, click data and intra-Overview position reporting remain absent from the report.
