Every link Google cites inside an AI Overview shares one position in Search Console, whether it sits in the first line of the answer or the last. Google states the rule in its Search Console help documentation, and in September John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, told a Reddit thread that position for AI features is “hard to do in a way that makes it useful”.

The admission lands on a number many B2B marketing teams still put in front of finance and leadership. Average position was designed for a page of ten blue links. AI Overviews now sit above the organic results on a large share of searches, Google has started loading some of them in full, and the one Search Console report built for AI features carries impressions but no clicks, queries or positions. A team reporting a stable average position may be describing visibility that no longer turns into visits.

How does Search Console record a link inside an AI Overview?

Search Console assigns an AI Overview a single position and gives every link inside it that same value. Google’s help page on impressions, position and clicks says the Overview takes one slot in the results and that all its links inherit it. A click on an external link inside the Overview counts as a click, and impressions follow Google’s standard rules.

Those standard rules decide more than the position rule does. Google counts an impression when a link appears on the current results page, even if the searcher never scrolls down to it. Inside expanding or independently scrolling elements, such as a carousel or an FAQ section, an item typically has to be scrolled into view or expanded with a click before it registers. Dan Taylor, head of innovation at the SEO agency 10 Spurs, applied that to AI Overviews in Search Engine Journal on 24 September: citations in the visible part of the answer count on page load, while those behind a “Show more” control count only once someone opens it.

Mueller’s comments, reported by Search Engine Journal on 13 September, answered an r/SEO post arguing that the data still follows ten-blue-link logic. He said Google tracks AI Overviews as it tracks many search features, as a block, and that position is not broken out in the separate generative AI performance report. He then asked practitioners what position data would actually help them. Google has announced no change.

That separate report does not close the gap. Google switched on generative AI performance reports in Search Console for a subset of UK sites in June and made them available worldwide by 31 August, as Search Engine Journal reported. They count impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover, by page, country and date, with no click, query or position data. Google’s developer guidance on AI features, last updated on 10 December 2025, still files AI feature traffic inside the ordinary Web search type of the Performance report.

Why does Google’s August auto-expansion change the numbers?

Google’s decision to load some AI Overviews in full removes the control that kept lower citations out of the impression count. Google confirmed on 28 August that on an undisclosed set of desktop queries, Overviews now open at full length without a “Show more” button, as The Marketing Helm reported in September.

Under the rules Google has documented, a citation that previously sat behind the button, and registered nothing until someone clicked it, should now register an impression as soon as the page loads, at the Overview’s shared position. Google has not said how expansion affects Search Console data, and neither its help page nor Mueller’s comments address auto-expanded Overviews directly. If the rules apply as written, a site cited low in an expanded answer would see impressions rise at the top of the page on the same queries where the expanded answer pushes organic links further down.

The click data on those queries runs the other way. A randomised field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon University, revised on SSRN on 17 June, found that hiding AI Overviews lifted organic clicks by 39.8% on queries where one would have appeared. Overviews triggered on about 41% of the queries in the study and sat above every organic result in more than 87% of those cases. The paper has not yet completed peer review.

Averaging hides the swing. Taylor’s example is a page that holds position 1 on searches where an Overview cites it and position 19 on searches where none appears; Search Console reports one blended figure somewhere between the two, and nothing in that figure says which kind of search produced the visits.

What can marketing teams report instead?

Google’s own guidance points marketing teams beyond Search Console for the outcome. Its AI features documentation recommends tracking conversions and time on site in an analytics tool, and says clicks from results pages with AI Overviews tend to be higher quality, with visitors spending longer on site. That is Google’s claim. The Agarwal and Sen experiment compared the clicks Overviews remove with those that survive and found no significant difference in engagement.

Taylor’s recommendation is to treat AI visibility as binary, cited or not cited, and to judge performance on visits, enquiries and conversions. For a B2B team that means a handful of changes to the monthly report rather than a new dashboard. Average position stays, labelled as the position of a block wherever it covers queries that trigger Overviews. Impressions from the generative AI report sit next to it as a measure of presence, not traffic. Organic sessions, demo requests and pipeline sourced from organic search carry the performance case.

Where citation tracking matters, third-party rank trackers that sample results pages for a fixed list of priority queries can show which sources an Overview cites. Those tools record snapshots for chosen locations and devices, not every search, and their numbers belong in a separate column from Search Console’s.

Mueller’s request for ideas is still open, and Google has given no timeline for change. Until it does, the AI Overview position in Search Console records where the block sat on the page, not which link inside it anyone read.