The verdict
Search Console’s Generative AI performance report has been live for every site since 31 August 2026. It shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date. It shows no clicks and no queries. Read it beside the ordinary Performance report, page by page, and you have better data than any paid visibility score.
For two years the question “are we showing up in AI Overviews?” had no first-party answer. Clients paid for tools that ran prompts and estimated it. Now Google reports it directly, and most of the sites I look at have not opened the report yet.
What it is
Google announced the Generative AI performance reports on 3 June 2026 and finished rolling them out to all websites on 31 August. There is one for Search and a separate one for Discover.
The Search report shows how often your URLs appeared in generative AI features. Google’s help documentation names AI Overviews and AI Mode as the features covered, and the dimensions as pages, countries, devices and dates. Search Labs experiments are excluded. If a site has too few AI impressions, the report may not appear at all.
What it does not show
Two things people assume are there and are not.
- Clicks. The report counts impressions only. Google says it may add metrics over time, but today there is no AI click number in it.
- Queries. There is no query dimension. You can see which pages appeared, not what people asked when they did.
Two details matter when reading the totals. The chart aggregates by property, so two of your pages in one AI answer count as a single impression in the chart. The table, grouped by page, counts them separately, so the two totals will not match. And the usual limits of the Performance report apply, including the 1,000-row cap.
Google also says this data “is included in the overall performance report”. The AI report is a separate view of impressions you were already being counted for, not a new source of traffic.
How I read it
- Start with the pages list. Which pages appear in AI features at all. On most local and ecommerce sites I would expect the informational posts to dominate it, not the service or product pages.
- Put it beside the main report, page by page. A page whose AI impressions are climbing while its clicks in the ordinary Performance report are falling is being answered above you. That is a result-page change, not a ranking problem, and rewriting the page will not fix it.
- Check the commercial pages separately. If a service page shows up in AI answers and its clicks are steady, nothing is wrong. If its clicks fell and it is absent from AI features, look for an ordinary cause first.
- Split by device. AI answers take more of a phone screen, so the same page can behave differently on mobile and desktop.
The pattern behind all of this is public. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb’s US panel found AI Overviews on more than a fifth of searches, cutting click-through by roughly 60% where they appear. The report lets you see whether that is happening to your pages or only to other people’s.
What it replaces
Most paid “AI visibility” scores, for Google at least. They run a list of prompts somebody chose and count mentions, which is an estimate. This is Google’s count of real appearances. For ChatGPT and the other assistants there is still no equivalent, and a careful manual check each month remains the honest method there.
Measuring is the last item on a list Google’s own guidance makes short. The rest is in what Google says about AI Overviews and the Search index.
The short version
- Live for every site since 31 August 2026. Search and Discover have separate reports.
- Impressions only. No clicks, no queries.
- Chart and table totals differ by design. The chart counts one per property per answer.
- Read it beside the main report. Rising AI impressions with falling clicks is a result-page change.
- Expect informational pages to dominate. Commercial pages behave differently.
- It replaces paid visibility scores for Google. Not for other assistants.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. If you want somebody to read your Search Console data and tell you what AI features are and are not doing to it, that’s part of SEO consulting.
