I opened Search Console last week to find out why my macOS 27 "bad CPU type in executable" post was fading. Clicks had gone from about 300 a week to about 160. Position hadn't moved. The exact error string still sat at 1.1.

So I scrolled down the Queries table to see what else people were typing. Past the error messages with tool names on the end, past the ones with /usr/local/bin/ paths in them, down where every row has one impression, I found these:

it worked before
what's the fix?
same error
i mean macos 27
help
intel
without sudo
не помогло

One impression each. Zero clicks. Position somewhere between 3 and 14.

Nobody opens Google and types help. Nobody searches for intel and expects a blog post about Rosetta. And yet Search Console was telling me, with a straight face, that someone had typed it worked before and my page came fourth.

They had typed it. Just not into the search box.

They're replies, not searches

These are turns in an AI Mode conversation. Someone pastes the error, gets an answer, and replies the way you'd reply to a colleague: same error, what's the fix?, i mean macos 27. Behind each reply Google runs searches of its own, picks pages to cite, and shows them as links next to the answer.

Every one of those links counts as an impression. Search Console files the impression under the text the person typed for that turn. Which is why the "query" is the reply.

Google folded AI Mode into the Performance report last year and gave it no filter of its own, so the rows sit in the same table as the real searches. The help pages define a query as the search terms that led to your site and say nothing about follow-ups. The fragments explain themselves well enough.

Take 22 October. Among the 42 queries that showed my page that day, there's what's the fix? at position 4.0. Someone had the error, got the explanation, asked for the fix, and Google answered with the Rosetta command and a list of four sources. Mine was the fourth. They didn't click it. They had the fix.

The same day has this as a query, verbatim, at position 8:

==> pouring portable-ruby-4.0.7.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz /usr/local/homebrew/library/homebrew/cmd/vendor-install.sh: line 283: ./4.0.7/bin/ruby: bad cpu type in executable error: failed to install ruby 4.0.7! error: failed to upgrade homebrew portable ruby!

That's not a search either. That's someone selecting their whole terminal and pasting it.

Position means something else here

In a normal results page, position 4 is the fourth blue link. In an AI Mode row it's where your link sat among the sources the answer cited. it worked before, same error, i mean macos 27 and what's the fix? all show position 4.0, on different days, so these are different people, each getting my page as the fourth citation in their conversation.

не помогло is Russian for didn't help. Someone told Google, in Russian, that the fix hadn't worked, and Google's next answer cited my page ninth. Fair enough. It was the ninth link.

About 25 rows like this turned up in 28 days, against 11,000 impressions for the page. As a share of traffic they're a rounding error. As information they're the most interesting rows in the table.

The report that counts them, partly

Search Console now has a Generative AI performance report under Performance. Google launched it on 3 June 2026 for a subset of UK sites and rolled it out worldwide on 31 August. It counts how many times links to your site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, device and date.

That's the whole report. Impressions, split four ways, and nothing about which queries produced them or whether anyone clicked. Google says it will introduce additional metrics over time.

For my post it showed 3,500 impressions in those same 28 days. One in three times Google showed my page in October, it showed it inside an AI answer. The daily number ran at 150 to 200 for most of the month, then dropped to 54 by 30 October as the macOS 27 upgrade problem worked its way through the population.

What it did to clicks

The exact query, zsh: bad cpu type in executable: aws, has a 41% click-through rate over 28 days. Over the last seven it's 31%. Position: 1.1, then 1.2. Nothing moved except the share of people who click.

A live search for it now opens with an AI Overview that gives the softwareupdate --install-rosetta command and the brew reinstall, and cites a MongoDB forum thread, two GitHub issues and a video converter's troubleshooting page. Not the post ranking first directly underneath it.

Inside AI Mode the numbers are starker. Every fragment row shows zero clicks. The person got an answer built partly from my page, saw my link in the list, and moved on. That's the deal now. You can rank first and still be the footnote.

Read the bottom of the list

The useful part is what the fragments say. They're the questions people asked after the first answer didn't settle things, and they're oddly specific:

without sudo
on intel mac
intel macbook pro
openshift cli
java bad cpu type in executable
webpack
gitproxy
tahoe 26.6.2
failed to install ruby 4.0.7!

My post covers the AWS CLI, node, git, Homebrew, kubectl and a Node notifier binary. It says nothing about running it without sudo, nothing about the OpenShift CLI or Java, and the Intel Mac rows are the mirror-image problem: arm64-only binaries on an Intel machine. Each row is a section I haven't written, asked for by someone who'd already read the AI's summary of what I had.

Sort the Queries table by impressions and the top tells you what you rank for. Scroll to the bottom and it tells you what you're missing.