Google Admits Its Search Console AI Reporting Does Not Tell You Much

Google's John Mueller has acknowledged that the AI search reporting inside Search Console does not accurately reflect your AI search visibility. Impressions count links people never saw, position numbers describe the block instead of your link, and some of the data is already in your regular performance report. If you have been building AI visibility reports on these numbers, you need to read this before your next client call.

What Google Actually Admitted

In a Reddit thread reported this week, Mueller agreed with a user's assessment that the metrics in Search Console do not tell you what you think they tell you about AI search.

He explained that measuring position for these results is difficult to do in a way that would actually be useful, and said Google currently tracks them the way it tracks many other search features, as a single block rather than as individual links.

That single sentence explains most of the confusion people have had with this report since it launched.

The Four Problems With The Data

• Impressions do not mean anyone saw you. If your content renders on the results page that was served, it counts as an impression. It does not matter whether the user scrolled far enough to see it.
• Hidden links are undercounted. Links sitting behind an expandable section are not counted until a user clicks to reveal them. So your real exposure in those cases is understated.
• Position describes the block, not you. The position number reflects where the AI Overview block sat on the page. It says nothing about where your link sat inside that block.
• Some of it is not new data. The report shows filtered data that is already included in the regular search performance reports, rather than a separate set of insights.

Read those together and you get a strange picture. One metric overcounts, another undercounts, the third measures something other than what its name suggests, and part of the report is a filtered view of numbers you already had.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds

Search Console added AI search data worldwide earlier this month, and a lot of people immediately started reporting on it. That is the problem. A metric being available is not the same as a metric being meaningful.

The undercounting issue connects to something else that changed recently. Google has been auto-expanding AI Overviews and dropping the show more button, which changes how many links are visible without a click. If expansion behavior is shifting while hidden links go uncounted, your impression trend can move without your visibility moving at all.

Keep in mind, this is exactly the failure mode that burns people. Nobody sends you an alert that a metric is unreliable. You find out when a client asks why AI impressions doubled and traffic did not.

Google Does Not Have A Fix Yet

Mueller said Google does not currently have a better solution, and he asked the community for ideas. His words: "If any of you have thoughts on what would be useful in terms of tracking position, I'd love to hear."

No timeline was given for a change. So this is the reporting you have for the foreseeable future, and you should use it accordingly.

My Take

I would stop treating AI impressions as a visibility metric entirely. Track it as a directional signal at best, and never put it in a report as a standalone number without a caveat attached.

One of the biggest mistakes I see right now is people building AI visibility dashboards on top of platform metrics nobody has validated. The platform just told you the metric is limited. Believe it.

The better move is to measure AI visibility the way you would measure anything else you do not fully trust the platform on, which is by checking the actual results yourself for the queries you care about. That is slower. It is also real. Here is how I approach GEO keyword research and tracking your AI visibility directly.

The good news? Clicks are still clicks. The click data in Search Console is not what Mueller was calling into question. If AI search is sending you traffic, that part still shows up honestly.

Question to Answer:

For your ten most important queries, do you actually know whether your site appears in the AI results, or are you inferring it from an impressions chart?

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