Google Abandons Traditional Search Ranking System

Google's John Mueller has revealed that the traditional ranking system of position 1-10 is no longer applicable in today's search results pages. In a recent Reddit post, Mueller explained that with the increasing presence of Generative AI features such as AI Overviews, featured snippets, and people also ask, it's become difficult to map a simple position for site owners.

Mueller noted that Google has a help document detailing how impressions are counted for Generative AI in Search Console. However, he emphasized that the traditional ranking system is hard to make useful for site owners due to the complexity of search results pages.

The issue arises from the numerous ways users can interact with search results, including AI Overviews and featured snippets. As a result, Mueller stated that Google is currently tracking impressions like it does for many other search features, as a block, rather than separating them out in the Gen-AI performance report.