Sign in Subscribe
SEO

Position 0: Your Brand’s New Power Play in Google Search

Angie Bergmann

• 3 min read
Share
Position 0: Your Brand’s New Power Play in Google Search

Originally published July 2025. Updated April 2026 because the search landscape moves fast and so does my opinion.

When I wrote about Position 0 last summer, the conversation was still mostly about featured snippets and the occasional AI Overview. Less than a year later, the SERP has been completely restructured. AI Overviews are now the default for a huge share of informational queries. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are pulling traffic that used to land on traditional results. And every other LinkedIn post is announcing the death of organic search.

Here's the thing: Position 0 didn't lose relevance. It got more important. And the strategy I argued for last year (lean in, don't fight it) is the only strategy that actually works in 2026.

The SERP isn't dying, it's stratifying

Google's "Position 0" is no longer one slot. It's a stack: AI Overview at the top, followed by featured snippets, "People Also Ask," images, videos, news, discussions, and the occasional shopping module. What surfaces depends entirely on query intent. Informational queries lean AI-heavy. Commercial queries still favor traditional rankings and ads. Branded queries are their own animal.

The old "1 site = 1 ranking" mental model is dead. The new model is citation surface area. How many places on the SERP does your brand show up, in how many formats, for how many query types?

Position 0 is no longer optional

In 2025 I called Position 0 a "double-dip" opportunity. In 2026 it's the entry ticket. If you're not surfacing in AI Overviews, featured snippets, or model citations, you're not in the conversation. The user gets their answer from someone else. Often that someone else is a competitor with better-structured content and stronger PR signals.

The good news: the work to win here is the same work that's always won SEO. Solid content. Clean technical foundation. Robust structured data. Topical authority. The discipline didn't change. The stakes did.

What's actually new

The piece of this conversation that's genuinely different from 2024 isn't tactics. It's measurement.

Tracking Position 0 visibility now means tracking:

  • Featured snippet coverage (still relevant)
  • AI Overview presence and citation share
  • LLM brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini
  • Share of Model for your brand vs. competitors
  • Click-through patterns when AI summaries appear vs. don't

Tools like Profound, Peec, and Athena exist to measure this. Some are useful. Some are vibes wrapped in a dashboard. The honest answer is the measurement category is still maturing, and anyone selling you certainty is overselling.

What I told clients then, what I tell them now

Then: Lean into Position 0. Track featured snippet coverage. Measure visibility, not just clicks.

Now: Lean into the entire AI search stack. Track Position 0, AI Overview citations, LLM mentions, and traditional rankings as one integrated visibility metric. Stop reporting clicks like it's 2018. CTR is a flawed KPI in a SERP where the user's question gets answered above your link.

The KPI evolution: from rankings → to clicks → to visibility → to citations and assisted conversions. If your reporting hasn't caught up, your reporting is lying to your stakeholders.

How to win Position 0 in 2026

Same fundamentals as 2025, with the volume turned up:

  • Content that actually answers the question. Comprehensive, well-structured, written for humans first.
  • Technical SEO that doesn't break. Crawlability, indexing, Core Web Vitals, hreflang if you're international.
  • Aggressive structured data. Use every applicable schema type. JSON-LD everywhere it belongs.
  • Brand and PR signals. This is the new lever. AI models cite sources weighted by authority and mention volume. Digital PR isn't a "nice to have" anymore. It's foundational.
  • Entity clarity. Your brand needs to exist as a clean, well-defined entity across the web. Wikipedia, Wikidata, structured profiles, consistent NAP, the works.

The real takeaway

Position 0 isn't a feature to optimize for. It's the new shape of search. The brands that win in 2026 are the ones that stopped thinking of SEO as "rankings" and started thinking of it as "everywhere your audience asks a question, your brand has a credible answer."

The fundamentals didn't change. The surface area did. Lean in.