Your Google position number may not mean what it used to
Google's John Mueller says the old idea of ranking one to ten is hard to map onto search results now.
Google's John Mueller says the old "position 1 - 10" idea, where your page sits somewhere in a list of ten blue links, is hard to map for site owners today. Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) reported the comment from a thread on the r/SEO forum, and the r/SEO account shared it again.
Google's @johnmu says the old "position 1 - 10" is hard to map for site owners
Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) filled in how the counting actually works. An AI Overview, the AI written answer box that sits at the top of many results pages, is treated as one block. Every link inside that block gets the same position number. Gabe quoted Mueller saying Google is tracking it like it does for many search features, as a block, and that it is not separated out in the Gen-AI performance report.
For Gen-AI, it's treated as a block (at least for AIOs), so all links get the same position.
What this changes for you
The average position figure in Search Console (Google's free report showing how your site appears in search) is not a simple ranking anymore. If your link shows up inside an AI Overview, it is stamped with the position of the whole box, not the spot your page earned on its own. So your average position can move up or down for reasons that have nothing to do with your page climbing or falling.
That matters most if you check that number and treat it as a scoreboard. A drop might mean you lost ground. It might also mean the shape of the results page changed around you, or that more of your appearances are now coming from inside a block that is counted as one unit.
What to do
Stop using average position on its own to judge whether a page is doing well. Open Search Console, click Performance, and look at clicks and impressions for the pages you care about instead. Clicks are people actually arriving on your site. That number still means the same thing it always did.
If you want to compare like with like, filter by a single page and a single query rather than looking at your site average. A site wide average position blends together results pages that look nothing like each other, which is the whole reason Mueller says the old one to ten framing is hard to map.
Nobody at Google has announced a change to how the number is calculated. This is an explanation of how it already works, not a new feature. So there is nothing to fix on your site. The fix is in how you read the report.