Google's AI report can't rank you

The Gen AI report I first shared earlier (read it here), back when AI Mode had just passed a billion monthly users, finished rolling out worldwide on August 31.

Merchant Center moved too - what was a small US pilot is now available everywhere.

But Search Console still hasn't changed - it only shows impressions, broken down by page, country, device, and date. No clicks yet.

Position is still missing - a Google engineer admitted Google can't really measure it yet.

Google is pushing people toward AI Mode.

Some AI Overviews now expand into a full answer without clicking "Show more". The AI Mode button used to sit in a tab and now it sits right next to the search bar.

The position gap

Kenichi Suzuki, a Google Product Expert, asked this on LinkedIn: does an AI Mode answer count each link inside it as its own position, or does the whole answer count as one, the same way an AI Overview already does?

John Mueller, who runs Search Relations at Google, answered him directly: position is "hard to do in a way that makes it useful", so Google tracks it the way it tracks other results that bundle multiple links into one, as a single block.

It isn't broken out separately in the Gen-AI performance report. Google treats the whole answer as one block, the same way it treats other results built from multiple links, but that block-level number isn't there anywhere in the report either.

The other blind spot

It's not just Search Console. GA4 gets this wrong too. Its AI Assistant channel auto-tags clicks from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude with no setup needed.

A click from Google's own AI Mode or AI Overviews doesn't get tagged that way. It gets filed under Organic Search instead. The one AI surface Search Console measures is the one GA4 mislabels. So pairing the two reports still won't give you an exact number.

What this looks like on a real product

Searched "best queen mattress under $800".

Before clicking "Show more", only the Nectar Classic Memory Foam shows up, named directly in the lead sentence as "the top-rated choice".

Click "Show more" and 3 more mattresses appear. Beautyrest BR800 and the others won’t count as an impression before that. But now they would get an impression too.

Also, look at the citations in this same answer. If those turn out to be two different pages from the same site, Search Console will count them as 2 different impressions.

For more details, do read what Google's AI reports actually show.

Run the catalog visibility audit → checks whether your catalog data is complete enough to get named in an answer in the first place.

- Ankit