Reading Search Console position and CTR with AI Overviews

By Redacción Usanzia · Published 27 October 2026

In Search Console, an AI Overview takes a single position and every link in it shares it; its clicks and impressions are included in the Web search type. So your average position can improve while CTR drops, without your content changing. The generative AI report shows impressions only: compare periods, split clicks from impressions, and don't assume causes.

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How does Search Console count AI Overviews and AI Mode?

Search Console includes AI Overviews and AI Mode data in the Performance report, under the Web search type, alongside every other result. Google explains this in its page on AI features and your website and sets out the rules in its help article on impressions, position and clicks:

• AI Overviews. A click on a link to an external page counts as a click, and standard impression rules apply. The AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all its links are assigned that same position.
• AI Mode. Clicks to external pages count as clicks and impressions follow the standard rules. Position follows the same methodology as a Google results page. A follow-up question counts as a new query, with its own impressions, position and clicks.
• Search Labs. Search Console doesn't include data from Search Labs experiments.

Average position is the topmost position a link to your property holds for each query, averaged across all the queries you appeared for, and in the same help article Google warns that it's a complex metric that can be misleading, so it recommends watching how it changes over time rather than just its absolute value.

What does the generative AI performance report show?

The generative AI performance report is a Search Console view that shows impressions only in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google announced it on 3 June 2026 on the Search Central blog and rolled it out to all sites on 31 August 2026.

What it gives you:

• impressions grouped by page, country, device or date;
• a search type filter: text-based web or multimodal (image searches such as Google Lens or Circle to Search);
• export of chart and table data.

What it doesn't give you, as of 27 October 2026: clicks, CTR, position or queries (Google has said it may add metrics). Its data is already included in the overall Performance report, so you shouldn't add the two together.

Why can position go up while CTR goes down?

Because an AI Overview citation can give you a high position and few clicks at the same time. If the AI Overview sits at the top and your link is inside it, that query records the AI Overview's position as your topmost position. If the user gets what they need from the summary and doesn't click, you gain a well-positioned impression with no click: average position improves and CTR falls.

The effect gets blurred in the data because the Performance report doesn't tell you, query by query, whether the impression came from the AI Overview or a classic result. That's why we treat a position rise with a CTR drop as a hypothesis to check, not a diagnosis.

What do studies say about CTR with AI Overviews?

Studies with published methodologies agree that organic CTR is lower when an AI Overview appears, but they measure different things and aren't comparable with each other:

Two of Seer's findings fit the method in this article. In its sample, cited brands saw CTR fall because impressions more than doubled while clicks held steady, which is why Seer advises looking at clicks and impressions separately before reading anything into CTR. And among its informational queries, comparisons triggered an AI Overview 95.4% of the time (267 of 280) and questions 85.9% (1,214 of 1,413).

Semrush states it measures the US; Ahrefs and Seer don't state the market. None of them focuses on your market or your site. Use them to form hypotheses, not to forecast your traffic.

What can't you conclude from Search Console data?

With today's Search Console data you can't calculate CTR inside AI Overviews or see which queries earned you impressions there. The generative AI report has no query dimension and no click metric, and the Performance report mixes AI features with classic results.

It's also worth avoiding:

• Blaming AI Overviews for a CTR drop without checking the results page for the affected queries.
• Reading a single month as a trend. Compare like-for-like periods.
• Adding generative AI impressions to Performance report impressions: they're already included.
• Comparing chart totals with table totals. Google warns they can differ because they're aggregated differently (by property or by page).

Google states in its documentation that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, which it defines as users spending more time on the site, rather than presenting it as a cause. It doesn't publish the data behind this, so we report it as Google's claim rather than a verified figure.

Trust and evidence

• Primary sources: Google's documentation on AI features and your website, the Search Console help articles on impressions, position and clicks, the generative AI performance report and advanced filtering and comparison, the Search Central blog post of 3 June 2026, and the original studies by Ahrefs, Seer Interactive and Semrush. All checked on 27 October 2026.
• Original testing: we haven't run our own test for this article (we don't yet have a Search Console property with enough data). When we do, we'll apply the method in the steps and publish the results.
• Method and limitations: every measurement rule was checked against Google's English documentation. The "AI impression share" in the steps is our approximation, not a Google metric. All three studies come from companies that sell SEO tools or services and use different methods; only Semrush states its market (the US). We don't quote global AI Overview coverage figures because each tracker calculates them on its own keyword panel and they aren't comparable.