Google’s own rank-tracking vocabulary has stopped matching the page it describes. Responding to a Search Console question on Reddit, John Mueller said the traditional “position 1 to 10” framework is difficult to apply to a results page built from AI Overviews, citations, featured snippets, and People Also Ask blocks. The admission matters because position has been the default proxy for visibility since Search Console existed.

Mueller was answering a question about how Search Console counts impressions for generative AI results. According to Search Engine Roundtable, which first reported the exchange, Google is currently tracking those impressions as a single block rather than assigning a numbered slot, the same method it uses for other search features. The Gen-AI performance report carries no position breakdown at all.

Mueller’s own words draw the line plainly. “Position for these is hard to do in a way that makes it useful,” he wrote, adding that Google is tracking the feature “as a block” because it “isn’t separated out in the Gen-AI performance report.” He then went further, telling site owners the search results page now has “a lot of ways for users to interact,” which means the old single-column ranking model does not hold.

This is not a cosmetic reporting gap. Position 1 to 10 was never just a vanity number. It fed rank trackers, client reporting templates, forecasting models, and the entire commercial logic of SEO tools built on the premise that a query resolves to an ordered list. Google now says that premise breaks down once a query resolves to an AI Overview with multiple citations sitting above, beside, and inside a page that also contains a featured snippet and an expandable People Also Ask module.

Mueller closed his Reddit reply by asking the SEO community what a useful position metric would even look like, and by offering to bring suggestions back to his team. That is not the language of a company confident it has already solved measurement for the generative layer. It reads as an open request for help defining a unit that no longer exists in the form practitioners built their reporting around.

The timing sharpens the point. This publication reported on September 10 that AlsoAsked found 97 percent of People Also Ask answers are now AI generated, meaning one of the last blue-link-adjacent surfaces has itself become a generative output. Mueller is not describing the disappearance of ranking. He is describing a measurement system that was built for an ordered list of ten links now sitting on top of a page where citations, overviews, and answer boxes compete for the same impression.

Google has not proposed a replacement metric, and Mueller’s request for community input suggests one is not close. For now, teams should treat position-based rank tracking as a partial view rather than a scoreboard, and start pulling Gen-AI performance report impressions and clicks as a separate line item in client dashboards rather than trying to force them into a position column that Google itself says does not map cleanly anymore. Auditing which queries now trigger AI Overviews or AI-generated People Also Ask answers, independent of where a page ranks, is the more reliable signal available today.

Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) reported this exchange on September 10, 2026.