How to track AI Overviews when Google won't even show you the data

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Hey everyone :waving_hand:

Wrote up a full guide on how to track AI Overviews: six methods, from manual SERP checks to API setups. But the reason this guide even needs to exist is kind of absurd:

  • Google Search Console has no filter to separate AI Overview clicks from organic ones
  • AI Overviews cut position-1 organic CTR by 34–61% (massive shift you can’t even see)
  • Citation URLs are highly unstable: 0% of AIO retain the same citation sources over 31 days

What’s your current setup for tracking AI Overviews? (is it working as expected?)

Curious where people stand on this :raising_hands:

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We’re stitching together Ahrefs for presence tracking and GA4 for fragment tracking to capture partial click data. The fragment thing catches some AIO clicks, but it’s clearly undercounting. The numbers never line up with what we’d expect based on how often we see ourselves cited.

The most useful thing so far has actually been the manual checks. Noticed we’re getting cited for queries we don’t even rank top 10 for, which tracks with the whole fan-out query thing. Would’ve missed that completely if I’d only looked at our tracked keywords.

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