Google has quietly finished rolling out a new report to every Search Console property in the world. It is called Generative AI features, it lives under Performance, and it is the first time Google has ever shown site owners how often their pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Below is a screenshot of every section, what each one actually tells you, the three things the report hides, and what to do with it on Monday morning.
Search Console now shows where your pages appear in AI answers
- What it countsImpressions: the number of times a link to your site was shown inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, or generative AI features in Discover.
- How it breaks downBy page, country, device, and date. Exports to Google Sheets, Excel, or CSV.
- What it leaves outClicks, click-through rate, average position, the queries that triggered the answer, and any API access.
- How to read itAs a visibility report, not a traffic report. Pair it with Google Analytics 4 for the rest of the picture.
What Google Announced
Google introduced the Search Generative AI performance reports on June 3, 2026, initially for a small subset of sites so it could test and gather feedback. The same day it launched a companion setting, the Search generative AI control, that lets a site opt out of AI features entirely. Both moves landed alongside new conduct requirements from the UK Competition and Markets Authority, which is not a coincidence. On August 31 Google updated the announcement with one line that matters for everyone reading this:
The important nuance in Google’s wording is that this data was never missing from Search Console. AI Overview and AI Mode appearances have always been counted inside the Web search type of the regular Performance report. What is new is a separate view that isolates them, so for the first time you can see how much of your visibility is coming from AI answers versus classic blue links.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| May 18, 2026 | Earliest date with data in the new report. Nothing before this exists in Search Console, so this is day one of your AI visibility history. |
| June 3, 2026 | Google announces the Generative AI performance reports for Search and Discover plus the Search generative AI control, rolling out to a subset of sites, starting in the UK. |
| August 11, 2026 | The report appears in essentially every property at once, without a formal announcement. Most site owners first notice it here. |
| August 13, 2026 | A Google logging error starts under-reporting impressions in the Generative AI, Search, and Discover reports. John Mueller confirms it is “just a logging issue and not representative of visibility changes in Search.” |
| August 20, 2026 | Logging bug fixed. Charts from the affected week may still look strange until the repair below. |
| August 31, 2026 | Google confirms the worldwide rollout and notes the mid-August data has been repaired. |
How to Find the Generative AI Report in Search Console
There are two ways in, and both take under ten seconds.
- Open Search Console and pick the propertyGo to search.google.com/search-console and choose the site from the property dropdown in the top left. If you manage several sites, you will need to repeat this for each one; there is no cross-property view yet.
- Click Performance, then Generative AIPerformance in the left navigation now expands to reveal a child item labeled Generative AI. Click it. The page title reads “Performance, Generative AI features” with a Beta tag beside it.
- Or use the banner in the main Performance reportOpen the regular Performance report you already use and look directly under the chart. A blue information banner reads “Get more details on your site’s performance in generative AI features on Google Search” with an Open report link on the right.
Here is the full report as it loads, using the default 28-day range. Everything below walks through it one section at a time.
Every Section of the Report, Explained
If you have used the standard Google Search Console performance report, the layout will feel familiar. The differences are in what is missing, which we cover after the tour.
Date range, filters, and export
The top bar offers 24 hours, 7 days, 28 days, and 3 months as one-click presets, with a More button that opens a full date range dialog. The “Last update” stamp on the right tells you how fresh the data is; in our screenshot it was 9.5 hours old, which is typical. Google warns that the newest data is preliminary and can change over the next few hours, so do not read too much into the current day.
The Add filter menu is short: Page, Country, and Device. The Page filter is the useful one. Filter to a single URL, or to a folder such as /blog/, and the chart re-aggregates for just that slice. Note what is not on the list: there is no Query filter and no Search appearance filter, because the report does not carry that data.
The date range dialog and Compare mode
Click More and you get presets for the last 6, 12, and 16 months plus a custom start and end date. The Compare tab works exactly as it does in the main report, letting you put two periods side by side. Two cautions. First, the data only goes back to mid-May 2026, so the 12- and 16-month presets currently return the same thing as a custom range that starts in May. Second, any comparison that straddles August 13 to 20 will be distorted by the logging bug unless Google’s repair fully covers your property; check the data anomalies annotation before you trust the delta.
Total impressions and the chart
This is where the report is most obviously different from its parent. The main Performance report shows four tiles: clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. The Generative AI report shows one: Total impressions. Google defines an impression here as a link to your site being shown to a user inside a generative AI feature. If your page is one of several sources cited in an AI Overview, that counts as an impression whether or not the user expanded the sources panel.
The dropdown at the top right of the chart changes granularity. Hourly is only available for the 24-hour range and is mostly useful for confirming that a fresh piece of content has started appearing. Weekly and Monthly smooth out the daily noise, which on a small business site can be considerable: a single AI Overview on a popular question can double your day.
The Pages tab
This is the most valuable table in the report. It lists every URL that was shown inside an AI feature during the period, sorted by impressions. Google groups by the final URL after redirects and assigns data to the canonical, so if you have moved pages around you will see the destination, not the old address.
Look at what leads the list on this brokerage site: “how much house can I afford,” “what are seller concessions,” “what is a counter offer,” “what is debt-to-income ratio.” Every one of the top eight is an educational question-and-answer post. The homepage is tenth with 126 impressions, and the actual property listing pages do not appear in the top ten at all. That pattern is not unique to real estate. AI Overviews and AI Mode are built to answer questions, and they pull from pages that answer questions cleanly. If your site is nothing but service pages, expect a short list.
The Pages tab is the first hard evidence most business owners will ever see of which content Google’s AI actually trusts from their site.
The Countries tab
Impressions by the searcher’s location. For a local business this is a sanity check more than a strategy tool: you want to see your own country dominating, which it does here at roughly 95 percent. The long tail of Canada, India, New Zealand, and the UK is normal for question-style content; people in other countries ask the same mortgage questions, and Google’s AI does not care where the answer is hosted. Those impressions are not worth chasing, but they are not a problem either.
The Devices tab
Mobile, desktop, and tablet. Google notes this dimension is available for the Search version of the report, not the Discover version, since Discover is inherently mobile. On this property mobile leads at 55 percent, a slightly lower mobile share than its overall Search traffic, which is consistent with AI Mode skewing toward desktop use. If your mobile share here is much lower than in your main report, that is worth knowing, because it affects which device you should test your pages on.
The Days tab
The Days tab is the chart in table form, one row per day, sortable by date or by impressions. Its main use is export. Because there is no API for this report, a monthly CSV of the Days tab is the only way to build the long-term history Google is not keeping for you.
Reading the Numbers: A Real Example
Numbers without context are just numbers, so here is the same 28-day window in the main Performance report for the property in our screenshots.
Three takeaways from one property. First, one in seven of this site’s search appearances is now inside an AI answer, and until August that share was invisible to the owner. Second, the pages doing that work are the blog posts, not the pages the business would consider its money pages. Third, because the report has no clicks, we cannot say from Search Console alone how many of those 5,110 appearances became visits. That is the job of the next section.
This property is a client whose site we built and manage. If you want the back story on why it has 85 pages of question-and-answer content in the first place, the Apex Realty case study explains the content strategy behind it.
What the Report Hides
What you get
- Impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, combined.
- Pages that appeared, grouped by canonical URL.
- Countries and devices for those impressions.
- Dates at hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly grain.
- Page, country, and device filters plus Compare mode.
- Export to Sheets, Excel, or CSV.
- A separate Discover version for AI features in the Discover feed.
What you do not get
- Clicks, CTR, or position. There is no way to see whether the visibility produced a visit.
- Queries. You get the page, never the prompt. You cannot see which question triggered the AI answer.
- A split between AI Overviews and AI Mode. They are one bucket.
- API access. The Search Analytics API rejects AI search types; export is manual only.
- History before mid-May 2026. The data window starts there.
- Search Labs experiments. Excluded until they graduate.
The missing queries are the gap that hurts most. In the main report you can see that a page ranked for “what are seller concessions” and drew clicks; in the AI report you can only see that the page appeared in some AI answer, somewhere, for something. Google has said it will introduce additional metrics over time, and the June announcement explicitly invited feedback through the report’s Submit feedback link. Use it. Query data and clicks are the two things to ask for.
Why Impressions Without Clicks Still Matter
It is tempting to dismiss a report that cannot show clicks. That would be a mistake, because the best third-party data on AI Overviews says being cited changes what happens to your other clicks on the same page of results.
What Seer Interactive Found
Seer’s April 2026 study tracked 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, and 2.43 billion organic impressions from January 2025 through February 2026. On informational queries where an AI Overview appeared:
- Brands cited in the AI Overview earned a 2.07 percent organic click-through rate.
- Brands not cited earned 0.94 percent on the same kind of queries. Being cited delivered roughly 120 percent more organic clicks per impression.
- Paid ads on those queries followed the same pattern: 15.74 percent CTR when cited versus 11.19 percent when not.
- AI Overviews showed on 85.9 percent of question-format queries and 76.9 percent of “near me” queries, the two formats local businesses live on.
In other words, the impression the new report counts is a proxy for whether you are inside the answer or outside it, and that position roughly doubles your click rate on everything else you rank for.
So the report is not measuring traffic. It is measuring whether you are one of the sources Google’s AI trusts on a topic, and that trust has a measurable downstream effect. For AI overview tracking that is a genuinely useful number, and it is the only first-party one that exists. Every third-party AI visibility tracking tool is sampling prompts and guessing. This is Google telling you directly.
The Opt-Out Switch: Settings, then Search Generative AI
The report arrived with a control, and it is worth knowing where it is even if you never touch it. Open Settings in the left navigation and look for a new section labeled AI controls.
The two options are exactly what they say. Include, the default, lets your pages appear as links inside AI features and be used to ground the answers. Exclude removes your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover, and Google is blunt about the consequence: you will not receive any traffic or impressions from those features. Changes take a few days to apply.
Three things Google states plainly that are worth repeating, because they get garbled in a lot of coverage:
- It is not a ranking signal. The control affects only whether your content can appear in Search generative AI features. It is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for any other part of Search.
- It does not affect AI training. To limit training of the models behind these features you use the separate Google-Extended token in robots.txt. Flipping this switch does nothing to that one.
- It is property-wide. There is no page-level version yet. Child properties inherit the parent’s setting unless their owners override it.
Our recommendation for the small businesses we work with is to leave it on Include, and it is not close. AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode has passed one billion. Excluding yourself does not make those users go back to blue links; it just means a competitor gets cited instead. The publishers who are opting out are large news organizations with licensing leverage. A local plumber, dentist, or brokerage has none, and needs the visibility more.
The Discover version of the report
Google shipped a second report for generative AI features in Discover, the feed on the Google app and Android home screen. It has the same structure minus the Devices tab. For most local businesses it will read zero, as it does above, because Discover favors publishers with a steady stream of fresh, broadly interesting content. If you are a news site, a media brand, or you publish several times a week, check it. Otherwise do not worry about it.
What to Do With It: A Five-Step Routine
- Export it now, then monthlyThere is no API and no history before May. Export the Pages tab and the Days tab to Google Sheets on the first of each month. In a year you will have the only AI visibility history your business owns, and you will be able to see whether the share of impressions from AI features is rising.
- Calculate your AI shareDivide Total impressions in the Generative AI report by Total impressions in the main Performance report for the same date range. Ours was 14 percent. Write it down. That single ratio, tracked over time, tells you how fast AI answers are absorbing your visibility, which is the strategic question every business owner is really asking.
- Study the Pages tab for the content patternSort by impressions and look for what the top ten have in common. On almost every small business site it will be pages that answer one specific question with a direct answer in the first paragraph, a clear heading structure, and an FAQ section. That is your template for how to rank in AI Overviews: write more of what is already working. If you want a starting point, our guide to local SEO in 2026 covers the content structure that has held up as AI features expanded.
- Cross-reference with GA4 landing pagesTake your top five AI-featured pages and look them up in Google Analytics 4 under Reports, Engagement, Landing page, filtered to Organic Search. A page with 900 AI impressions and 40 organic sessions is doing fine. A page with 900 AI impressions and 4 sessions is being cited but not clicked, which usually means the AI answer is complete enough that nobody needs to visit. That is your cue to add something the summary cannot replace: a calculator, a local data table, a downloadable checklist, a video. Our attribution checklist walks through the GA4 setup.
- Add it to the monthly reportIf someone sends you an SEO report, ask for two new lines: AI impressions and AI share of total impressions. If they cannot produce them, they have not opened the report. It takes ten seconds to find and has been in every property since mid-August.
Two Things Not to Do
- Do not panic about a low number. A local business with 200 AI impressions a month is not failing at AI search optimization. It reflects how many question-style pages you have. Build more and the number follows.
- Do not treat the chart as traffic. A rising line here can coincide with falling clicks in the main report if AI answers are satisfying searchers without a visit. Always read the two reports together. If you have not already, our post on Google’s new goto redirect links explains why Search Console has become the reliable source for ranking data this year, and this report is the newest reason to live in it.
Where This Is Heading
Read Google’s wording carefully and the roadmap is visible. The announcement says the team is “continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights and data would be most helpful,” and specifically mentions “adding additional metrics over time.” The UK regulator that pushed for these controls has separately required page-level opt-outs by March 2027, which means the property-wide switch will get more granular whether Google wants it to or not.
Our read is that clicks arrive before queries. Google already counts clicks from AI features in the main report; splitting them out is an engineering task, not a policy decision. Query data is different. Showing the prompts that trigger AI answers would hand the SEO industry a map of AI Mode’s behavior, and Google has been steadily making that kind of data harder to get, not easier. Plan on impressions and pages being the durable core of this report, and build your AI search visibility measurement around them.
For the first time, Google is telling you which pages it trusts enough to put in an AI answer. That is the report. Everything else is what you do about it.
Want to Know Which of Your Pages Google’s AI Is Already Citing?
We check the Generative AI report, the main Performance report, and GA4 together for every client, and we build the question-and-answer content that gets cited in the first place. If you would like us to look at yours, the audit is free and takes a few days.
Elevated Ideas • Jacksonville, IL • Serving small businesses nationwide
Related Reading
More on measuring search the way Google measures it: why rank trackers broke in August and Search Console did not, how Search Console now tracks your social profiles as platform properties, the attribution tracking checklist for GBP, UTMs, and GA4, and how Google Business Profile management fits alongside all of it for local visibility.
Common Questions
Search Console Generative AI Report FAQ
What is the Generative AI report in Google Search Console?
It is a new Performance report that shows how often links to your site appeared inside Google’s generative AI features, specifically AI Overviews and AI Mode on Search, with a companion version for AI features in Discover. Google announced it on June 3, 2026 for a small group of sites and confirmed on August 31, 2026 that it has rolled out to every website worldwide. It reports impressions broken down by page, country, device, and date.
Where do I find the Generative AI report in Search Console?
Open Search Console, choose your property, and click Performance in the left navigation. A new child item called Generative AI appears beneath it. You can also open the main Performance report and click the Open report link in the blue banner under the chart. The report carries a Beta label, and the direct path is Performance, then Generative AI features.
Does the Generative AI report show clicks?
No. As of September 2026 the report shows impressions only. There is no click count, no click-through rate, and no average position. Google says it is working with site owners on which additional metrics to add over time, but nothing beyond impressions has been announced. To see what AI-driven visits actually do on your site, pair this report with the landing page reports in Google Analytics 4.
Does the report show which queries triggered the AI answer?
No. You get the page that appeared, never the question the searcher asked. The main Performance report still has a Queries tab, but the Generative AI report has only Pages, Countries, Devices, and Days. That is the biggest gap in the report and the one most SEO professionals are asking Google to close.
Are AI Overviews and AI Mode reported separately?
No. The report combines impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode into one total. There is no filter to split them apart. Search Labs experiments are excluded because they are still in development.
Why is the impressions number different from my main Performance report?
The Generative AI number is a subset of your regular Search impressions, not a separate pool. Google has always counted AI Overview and AI Mode appearances inside the Web search type in the main Performance report; the new report simply isolates them. On the property in our screenshots, 5,110 of 36,300 total impressions in the same 28 days, about 14 percent, came from generative AI features. Small differences between the chart total and the table total are normal because the chart aggregates by property and the table aggregates by URL.
Can I pull the Generative AI report through the Search Console API?
Not yet. The Search Analytics API still accepts only the legacy search types such as web, image, video, news, and discover. Requests that pass an AI-related type are rejected. The only way to get the data out is the Export button, which offers Google Sheets, Excel, and CSV. Set a recurring reminder to export it, because the report is the only place the number exists.
How far back does the Generative AI data go?
The report’s data window begins in mid-May 2026, so there is no history from before then. The date range picker offers presets up to the last 16 months, but anything earlier than the data window will show nothing. Start exporting now so you build your own history.
What happened to AI impressions in mid-August 2026?
Google confirmed a logging error that reduced impressions in the Generative AI report, the main Performance report, and the Discover report for data starting August 13, 2026. John Mueller said it was a logging issue and not representative of visibility changes in Search. The bug was fixed within about a week and Google noted on August 31 that the affected data had been repaired. If your chart still shows an odd dip in that window, check the data anomalies page before you draw a conclusion.
What is the Search generative AI control and should I turn it off?
It is a property-level setting under Settings, then AI controls, then Search generative AI. The default, Include, lets your pages appear as links and help ground answers in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover. Exclude removes you from all three, and Google says excluded sites will not receive any traffic or impressions from those features. For nearly every small business the right answer is to leave it on Include. Being cited in an AI answer is visibility you cannot get any other way, and opting out removes you from a surface with more than 2.5 billion monthly users.
Does excluding my site from AI features hurt my regular rankings?
No. Google states that the control only affects whether your content can appear in Search generative AI features and is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of Search. Your blue-link rankings, your Google Business Profile listing, and your Discover visibility outside of AI features are unaffected. Changes generally take a few days to apply, and child properties inherit the parent property’s setting unless their owners override it.
Does the control stop Google from training AI on my content?
No. The Search generative AI control governs whether your pages show up in AI features; it does not govern AI training. To limit training of the models behind these features, you use the Google-Extended user agent token in your robots.txt file. Those are two separate switches, and turning one off does nothing to the other.
How do I use the Generative AI report to improve AI search visibility?
Start with the Pages tab. The URLs with the most AI impressions tell you which kind of content Google’s AI features already trust from your site, and on most small business sites that is question-and-answer content rather than service pages. Write more pages in that format, keep each one focused on a single question, and answer it directly in the first paragraph. Then compare AI-featured pages against their GA4 landing page sessions so you know whether the visibility is producing visits. Export the report monthly and track the share of total impressions that comes from AI features.
Sources: Google Search Central: Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports, Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report (Search), Search Console Help: Search generative AI control, Google: New opportunities, control and insights for website owners, Search Engine Journal on the worldwide rollout, Search Engine Roundtable on the August logging error, Seer Interactive: AIO Impact on Google CTR, 2026 Update.