Your "Position 1" in Search Console Might Be a Ghost
Google changed how Search Console reports position for pages that show up inside AI Overviews. It now "flattens" those blocks, meaning your listing can get credited with a strong average position even when it's buried inside an AI summary that a renter skims and never clicks. On paper, your SEO looks like it's crushing it. In reality, you might be winning a spot nobody sees.
For an apartment operator, this is the exact metric your agency has been putting on slide three of every monthly report for years. Average position, next to a little green arrow, next to your logo. If that number just got easier to inflate without any actual increase in site visits or leads, you're paying for a report that flatters everyone except your budget.
The fix isn't complicated, it's just less comfortable for whoever's been leaning on position as the whole story. Search Engine Journal's advice is blunt: forget position, focus on outcomes. Visits. Conversions. Tours booked. Leases signed. Position was always a proxy. Now it's a proxy that Google itself just made less reliable, which means this is the moment to stop accepting it as the headline metric on your organic report.
Here's what to ask on the next call, and don't accept "we're keeping an eye on it" as an answer to any of these.
- 01Pull our average position trend for the last 90 days next to organic sessions and organic leads for the same period. Do they move together or has position gone up while sessions stayed flat or dropped?
- 02Which of our top 20 ranking keywords are currently triggering an AI Overview, and what percentage of our tracked page-one keywords fall into that bucket right now?
- 03In Search Console, break out our impressions and clicks specifically for pages appearing inside AI Overviews versus traditional blue links. What's the click-through rate on each?
- 04If block flattening is inflating our position numbers, what's the corrected estimate of our real visibility, and how are you calculating it since Google isn't handing you a clean toggle for this?
- 05Starting this month, can our monthly report lead with organic sessions and lead volume instead of average position, with position shown as a secondary line, not the headline number?
Source: Search Engine Journal, September 24, 2026
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