Search Console's AI Overview data is misleading. Read it carefully

The recurring question is how much traffic is going to AI Overviews. Search Console cannot answer it cleanly, and treating its numbers as if it can leads people to wrong conclusions.

When your page appears as a link inside an AI Overview, that is an impression. When someone expands the overview and clicks, that is a click. Both sit in the same performance report as normal results, with no dimension that separates answer box appearances from classic blue link positions. Position data is muddier too, since a citation inside the overview is not position one in the old sense. The specific ways this misleads are in this breakdown, with a US market reading.

Use the report for direction on segments you define yourself: clicks and click through rate on your top query clusters, week over week. Do not hand anyone a single AI Overview traffic loss figure, because no trustworthy source for that number exists yet.