On September 10, Google gave site owners the clearest signal yet that the scoreboard they have watched for twenty years is breaking. Asked how impressions are counted for generative AI results inside Search Console, Google Search Advocate John Mueller said that “the old ‘position 1 – 10’ is hard to map, or to make useful for site owners” (Search Engine Roundtable).
Read that twice. The number your last SEO provider put at the top of a monthly report is a number Google itself says it can no longer produce cleanly. Generative AI results are counted as a single block rather than assigned individual positions, and that block does not break out separately in the Gen AI performance report. Mueller went as far as asking the search industry what a useful position metric would even look like now.
That is not a reporting quirk. That is what happens when a results page stops being a list.
The page your customer sees is not the page you think you rank on
Two weeks before that, on August 28, Google removed the “Show more” button from AI Overviews on a set of queries. The full AI answer and an “Ask anything” prompt box now load expanded by default. Google’s own explanation: “For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people” (Search Engine Roundtable). Traditional listings slide down the page to make room.
Google has also been funneling people out of AI Overviews and into AI Mode, its full conversational search surface, through follow-up questions and expanded answers. The September 2026 webmaster roundup describes AI Overviews actively pushing searchers into AI Mode as a standing pattern, not a test (September 2026 Google webmaster report).
So picture how a homeowner now finds a plumber, a roofer, an attorney, a bookkeeper. They type a question. They read an answer. They ask a follow up. They get a short list of two or three businesses with a reason attached to each one. They call one of them. Ten blue links never enter the story. You can hold position three on a page nobody scrolls.
Ranking was the proxy. Getting named is the outcome.
Rankings were only ever useful because they predicted clicks, and clicks predicted calls. Break that chain and the metric is decoration. What matters now is whether an answer engine can identify your business, understand what you do and where you do it, decide you are credible, and put your name in front of someone who is ready to hire.
That is a harsher test. A ranking page has ten slots. An AI recommendation has two or three. And losing is quieter than it used to be. Nothing drops, no alert fires, your traffic just thins while a competitor who sorted this out earlier picks up the calls you used to get. Owners feel it before they can name it. Same spend, same site, fewer inbound calls. Rankings look fine. The phone says otherwise.
What actually determines who gets recommended
Answer engines are not reading your website the way a visitor does. They are trying to extract facts and confirm them. Broadly, a handful of things decide whether that goes well.
Your site has to be machine-readable, meaning the content, services, service area and contact details are structured so a model can parse them rather than infer them from a pretty layout. Your business needs entity clarity, meaning your name, category and location are consistent everywhere that matters so the model is confident you are one real, specific company. You need authority, which is corroboration from sources outside your own domain. You need reviews and reputation signals, because models lean on third-party consensus when they choose who to endorse. And you need structured signals on the page that state your offer, proof and answers plainly instead of burying them in marketing copy.
None of those are a checkbox. They interlock, and they have to be maintained as the platforms shift, which they are doing roughly every two weeks right now. This is the part most businesses get wrong: they treat it as a one-time fix rather than a system. We break down how that system is built on our how it works page, and what it has produced for other service businesses on our results page.
The uncomfortable part of Mueller’s comment is the timing. Google is publicly admitting the old measurement no longer maps while most service businesses are still buying reports built on it. If your provider is still selling you position tracking as the outcome, they are measuring a scoreboard Google has already stepped away from. Common questions about what replaces it are answered on our FAQ.
Andy Rodriguez is the founder of Agentic Growth Engine, which helps service businesses across the United States get found, trusted and recommended by AI search. Learn more about Andy Rodriguez.
When AI is asked who to recommend in your market, does it name you or your competitor? Position tracking will not tell you. A visibility audit will. Get a free AEO and SEO visibility audit and see exactly how answer engines read your business today, what they get wrong, and who they are recommending instead of you.