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For twenty years, “what position are we ranking in” has been one of the first questions any SEO asks about a page. This week, Google’s own John Mueller told site owners directly that the question itself is losing its meaning, and he said so while explaining how Search Console handles the AI features now sitting on top of the results page.
According to Search Engine Roundtable’s report published September 10, 2026, Mueller responded to a Reddit thread asking how impressions are counted for generative AI features in Google Search Console. His answer was blunt: “the old ‘position 1 – 10’ is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners.”
Executive Summary
Here’s what you need to know before diving in:
- On September 10, 2026, Google’s John Mueller told site owners on Reddit that the classic “position 1-10” ranking model “is hard to map, or to make useful,” in results now filled with AI Overviews, People Also Ask, and other blended elements.
- Mueller confirmed that Search Console’s Generative AI performance report counts AI Overview impressions as one collective block rather than breaking them out by individual citation position.
- Mueller invited the SEO community to weigh in on what position-tracking metrics would actually be useful going forward, signaling this is an open, unresolved question at Google.
- As supporting context: a separate Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords found that AI Overviews cut click-through rate for the number one organic result by 34.5% on desktop, comparing pre-rollout data from March 2024 to post-rollout data from March 2025 (Ahrefs, updated June 5, 2026).
What Google actually said, and why it matters
The exchange happened on Reddit, not in an official Google blog post, which is itself a small but telling detail: some of the most consequential clarifications about how modern Search Console reporting works are still arriving informally, through Google spokespeople answering practitioner questions in real time. Per Search Engine Roundtable’s write-up, a site owner asked how impressions get counted for generative AI features, and Mueller’s response cut to the core tension every SEO has felt over the past two years: the results page no longer looks like a simple ordered list.
Mueller explained that traditional position 1 through 10 metrics no longer map cleanly onto a page that includes AI Overviews with multiple citations, featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and other elements distributed throughout the layout. Rather than assign a clean numeric rank to each element, Google’s Generative AI performance report in Search Console counts AI-generated features as a collective block. In other words, if your page is cited inside an AI Overview, Search Console is not currently telling you whether you were the first citation or the fifth; you are inside “the AI Overview block,” full stop.
That is a real limitation for anyone trying to build reporting around AI visibility, and Mueller did not pretend otherwise. He pointed site owners toward Google’s existing help documentation on impression counting methodology, but he also explicitly invited community feedback on what position-tracking metrics would actually be useful going forward. That is Google acknowledging, in public, that it does not yet have a good answer here, not that the reporting gap is intentional or permanent.
This matters beyond a single Reddit thread because it validates something a lot of agencies and in-house teams have been arguing internally for a while: average position, as a KPI, is losing reliability exactly as AI features become more central to how people search. That is not just a Google Search Console problem; it lines up with independent data on how AI Overviews change click behavior in the first place. Ahrefs’ study of 300,000 keywords, split evenly between queries with and without AI Overviews, compared desktop click-through rate for the top organic position before AI Overviews rolled out (March 2024) against after (March 2025). Position-one CTR fell from roughly 7.3% to roughly 2.6%, a 34.5% reduction, a figure Ahrefs has kept updated as recently as June 5, 2026. That statistic is not part of Mueller’s comments; we are including it here, clearly labeled, as relevant supporting context on the scale of the shift he is describing.
ARC Marketing’s Take
“Clients still ask us for their average position number every month, and increasingly that number just isn’t telling them anything true,” says ARC Marketing. “Google confirming that even they can’t cleanly map position 1 through 10 anymore is the validation we’ve been waiting for to change how we report.”
On the measurement side specifically, ARC has already retired average position as the headline KPI in client dashboards this quarter. In its place, we are tracking share of AI Overview citations for a client’s tracked query set alongside non-branded organic click volume, because a citation with no resulting click tells a very different story than a top-three ranking that used to reliably drive traffic. We are also building the assumption that click-through benchmarks will keep sliding for any AI Overview-eligible query into how we set client expectations and forecasts, rather than waiting for another study to confirm the trend before we act on it.
FAQ
What did John Mueller say about position 1-10 tracking?
On September 10, 2026, responding to a Reddit thread, Mueller said the old “position 1 – 10” model “is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners,” given how AI Overviews, People Also Ask, and other elements now share the results page.
Why is position tracking harder to use in Google Search Console now?
Because Search Console’s Generative AI performance report counts AI Overview impressions as one collective block rather than assigning them an individual citation position, making it difficult to know exactly where a page appeared within an AI Overview.
Does this mean Google Search Console is broken?
No. Google’s existing reporting still works as documented; Mueller was acknowledging a limitation in how useful traditional position metrics are for interpreting that data, not announcing a bug or an outage.
How much do AI Overviews affect organic click-through rates?
Separately from Mueller’s comments, an Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords found that AI Overviews reduced click-through rate for the number one organic result by 34.5% on desktop, comparing March 2024 to March 2025 data, with the study last updated June 5, 2026.
What should SEOs track instead of average position?
There is no single official replacement yet. Mueller explicitly invited community input on what would be useful. In the meantime, tracking share of AI Overview citations alongside actual click and conversion data provides a more complete picture than position alone.
Is Google planning to change how Search Console reports AI Overview data?
Nothing has been officially announced. Mueller’s comments signal that Google is actively soliciting feedback on this issue, which suggests changes are possible but not yet confirmed or scheduled.
Sources
- “Google Says The Old Position 1-10 Is Hard To Map For Site Owners,” Search Engine Roundtable, September 10, 2026: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-position-1-10-hard-map-42053.html
- Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan, “AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%,” Ahrefs, published April 17, 2025, updated June 5, 2026: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/