Google's Mueller: The Old 'Position 1-10' Is Hard to Map Now

John Mueller, answering questions about how Search Console counts impressions in its generative AI reporting, added a line that goes considerably further than the question asked:

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.

That is Google saying, plainly, that the metric the entire industry organises itself around is becoming difficult to define.

What was actually being asked

The immediate question was narrower: what counts as an impression when your link appears in a generative AI feature.

Mueller's answer on that point:

The impressions are based on links to your site being shown in AI Overviews / AI Mode. I don't know if just a favicon would be linked, but if it's linked to a page on your site, that would count. If something needs to be "activated" to see the link, it would only count when users do that.

Google's documentation says an impression is "the number of times a link to your site appears to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search."

Two things follow from that. Brand presence is not an impression — the link has to be there. And where a link is hidden behind an expand-to-see interaction, it only counts when someone actually expands it.

The position problem underneath

Position is where it gets genuinely messy, and the reason is structural rather than a reporting bug.

AI Overviews have historically assigned position one to every URL inside them, regardless of where in the block a given citation sits. AI Mode reportedly does something different, assigning position based on where the URL actually falls in the response.

So two AI surfaces, two different position semantics, both flowing into reports that sit alongside classic blue-link positions computed a third way. An average position figure spanning all of that is an average of things that aren't the same quantity.

This is what Mueller is gesturing at. It isn't that Google won't tell you your position. It's that a single ordinal number was always a compression of "where on the page did this appear", and the page no longer has one ordering.

What this means for reporting

Stop treating average position as a headline metric. It was already noisy. Across mixed surfaces with incompatible position semantics it's closer to meaningless. If it's on the first slide of your client report, it's overstating its own precision.

Segment before you conclude anything. Classic results and generative AI surfaces need separating before you draw a trend line. Blending them produces movements that look like ranking changes and aren't.

Impressions are now the more honest number — with the caveat that an impression requires a link, and activation-gated links only count on activation. So a drop in generative AI impressions may reflect fewer people expanding a panel rather than any change in how Google regards your content.

Expect the definitions to keep moving. These reports are new, the surfaces they measure are being redesigned constantly, and Google has already had to explain one logging error in this reporting. Build reporting that survives a definition change rather than dashboards that assume today's semantics are permanent.

The uncomfortable version

The industry's core reporting metric is being deprecated by circumstance rather than by announcement. Nobody is going to send an email saying average position has been retired. It will simply become less and less mappable to anything real, while continuing to appear in every tool, because the tools have to show something.

The practical response is to move your reporting weight onto quantities that still mean what they say — impressions, clicks, and revenue — and to treat position as a diagnostic signal rather than a KPI.

Sources

• Search Engine Roundtable: Google Says The Old Position 1-10 Is Hard To Map For Site Owners
• Search Engine Journal: Google's Mueller Explains How AI Search Impressions Get Counted
• PPC Land: Google gives Search Console its own generative AI visibility reports