AI Overviews sit above the results for a share of queries, and a reader who gets what they needed from the paragraph never reaches the ten links underneath. Search Console reports impressions and position for the page. It cannot tell you whether the paragraph above named the brand.
This is the surface where the gap between the two measurements is most visible, and it is the one people ask about first because they have seen it with their own eyes.
How we keep the two apart
- Different units, deliberatelyPlacement inside an answer is the order of first mention. It is never drawn in the same chart or the same unit as a Search Console position, because a reader who sees them together will average them.
- Different sourcesPosition comes from your own Search Console. Presence in an overview comes from reading the answer surface itself. We do not scrape search results.
- Different fixesA page that ranks and is not named is a different problem from a page that neither ranks nor is named, and the second is not solved by the first one's remedy.
What we can honestly tell you: whether this engine named you, in what order, alongside whom, and citing what — in the answers we bought, on the days we asked. What nobody can tell you is why it chose you, or that a change on the site will move it. We report the measurement and leave the causal story alone until we have measured enough weeks to know what its own noise looks like.
Do AI Overviews appear for every query?
No. They appear for a subset that changes, which is itself worth recording: a question that showed an overview last month and does not this month is a change in the surface rather than a change on your side.
Is this rank tracking?
No. We are not measuring where a link sits in a list of results; we are reading whether a brand is named in a paragraph. We do not scrape search results, and this product never will.
Try it on your own site, free
No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.