@picofarad its not what i use for search, so i don't know. it looks like FTS does know where the tokens are because there are functions that use that information https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html#_auxiliary_functions_

i would probably re-read over the docs carefully to see what it is you are wanting to do. some index systems also use different passes like having FTS very quickly find the top ten relevant docs to suggest, and then a different slower utility that does what you want (but now doesn't have to run over the whole corpus.)