Search Console's New AI Report: How to Read Your AI Overview Data

What changed

For the first time, Google Search Console shows you how often your site appears inside Google's generative AI features. Google introduced the Search Generative AI performance reports in June 2026 for a limited set of sites, then rolled them out to all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026.

There are two reports: one for Google Search, covering features like AI Overviews and AI Mode, and one for generative AI features in Google Discover. On the same date, Google made a new Search generative AI control available to every site — a setting that lets you exclude your site from those features entirely.

Before this, AI Overview and AI Mode activity was only counted inside the regular Performance report's "Web" totals, with no dedicated breakdown. This guide covers what the new report actually measures, what it doesn't, how to turn it into decisions, and whether the opt-out makes sense for your site.

What the report shows — and what it doesn't

At launch, the report is built around a single metric: impressions, which Google defines as how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. You can break those impressions down four ways:

Dimension	What it tells you
Pages	Which of your URLs AI features linked to — grouped by the final URL after any redirects
Countries	Where the searches that showed your links came from
Devices	Desktop, tablet, or mobile (in the Search report)
Dates	Impressions over time, grouped by day, week, or month

Just as important is what's missing:

• No clicks, CTR, or average position. You can see that a link to your page was shown in an AI feature, not whether anyone clicked it.
• No queries. You can see which pages earned AI impressions, but not which searches triggered them.
• Google only. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI assistants aren't Google products, so none of their activity appears here.
• Short history. The report is only a few months old, so year-over-year comparisons aren't possible yet.
• A minimum volume. A site needs enough impressions in AI features before the report populates, and Google hasn't published a specific threshold. A small site with an empty report isn't necessarily broken — it may just not have crossed that line yet.

How an "impression" is counted

The report follows Search Console's existing definitions of impressions, position, and clicks, which include two AI-specific rules: an AI Overview occupies a single position in the search results, with every link inside it assigned that same position, and standard impression rules apply to AI Mode.

The most important thing to understand: this report is a separate view of your data, not extra traffic. Google says AI feature data continues to be included in the overall Performance report under the "Web" search type. Your AI impressions are already inside your Web totals — don't add the two reports together, or you'll double-count.

How to actually use it

1. Find the pages Google's AI features link to most

Sort the Pages table by impressions. The top of that list shows which of your URLs Google's AI features lean on most. Compare it to the pages you consider most important to your business — a mismatch in either direction tells you something. For pages that do earn strong AI impressions, keep the facts on them current and think twice before restructuring, merging, or redirecting them.

2. Pair it with the regular Performance report

Because the AI report has no clicks, the useful signal comes from combining it with the regular Performance report. For a page with strong AI impressions, filter the standard Performance report to that page and compare its clicks and impressions over the same date range.

Rising AI impressions alongside flat or falling clicks is consistent with an AI feature answering the question directly on the results page — the pattern covered in our zero-click search guide. Treat it as a clue, not proof: without query or click data in the AI report, you can't attribute a change in clicks to an AI feature directly.

3. Investigate important pages with zero AI impressions

If a page you care about never appears, start with eligibility. Google's stated requirement for appearing as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode is that the page is indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet — there's no special markup or AI file involved. So check:

• Is the page indexed? Use URL Inspection in Search Console. If not, work through why a page isn't showing up on Google.
• Does it carry a nosnippet robots rule, or a very restrictive max-snippet value, that limits the text Google can show?
• Is the important content present as text on the page, rather than only in images or behind interactions?

If the page is fully eligible, the gap is about content and competition rather than a technical block. Our guide to appearing in AI Overviews covers what to work on from there.

4. Check the country and device split

If you serve specific markets, look at where your AI impressions actually come from. A large share of impressions from countries you don't serve, or very few on the device type most of your customers use, is worth knowing before you invest in more content aimed at AI visibility.

5. Rule out a reporting glitch before reacting to a drop

This report has already had one data problem. Google's Data anomalies page records a logging error that reduced impressions in the Search generative AI report for data from August 13 to 17, 2026; the missing data was restored on August 21. Before you rewrite a page because its AI impressions fell off a cliff, check that page first.

6. Export snapshots of your own

With only a few months of history, it's worth using the report's export option once a month to keep your own record of which pages earned AI impressions. That gives you a baseline to compare against as the report matures.

The new opt-out: the Search generative AI control

The other half of the August 31 rollout is a site-level setting in Search Console under Settings → Search generative AI. According to Google's documentation for the control, it has two states:

• Default, for every property: your content can appear in Search generative AI features, both as links and to help ground AI responses, and you can receive impressions and traffic from them.
• If you exclude your site: your content isn't shown to users in those features, isn't linked from them, and isn't used to ground their responses. You receive no impressions or traffic from them.

A few details matter before you touch it:

• It covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover.
• Google says it isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of Search, so excluding your site won't hurt — or help — your regular rankings.
• It doesn't affect AI training. Google points to its separate Google-Extended token for managing training use.
• Changes generally take a few days to apply, and some content can take longer to drop out because of caching.
• By default, a property inherits the setting from its top-level Domain property unless you configure it separately.

How it compares to the controls you already had

Control	Scope	Effect on regular search results
Search generative AI control	Whole property; AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover AI features only	None, per Google
nosnippet, max-snippet, data-nosnippet	Per page or per section; limits the text Google can show from it	Also limits your regular search snippets
noindex	Per page	Removes the page from Google Search entirely
Google-Extended (robots.txt)	Whole site; use of your content for AI model training	None — Google says it doesn't affect Search inclusion or ranking

Should you exclude your site?

For most small businesses and service sites, probably not. Excluding your site gives up every AI impression and any clicks those features send, and Google says you get no ranking benefit elsewhere in return. The case is strongest for sites whose revenue depends on people reading the full page — ad-supported publishers, for example — and that have real evidence, from the pairing exercise above, that AI features are absorbing their clicks.

Whichever way you lean, measure first. Once you've excluded your site, you'll have no new AI impressions to compare against, so capture a baseline before you change anything.

Start with the foundation

None of this report's data can exist for a page Google can't crawl, index, and show with a snippet. Peak Visibility's free checker reviews selected technical signals on your live page — title and meta description, schema, canonical tag, robots.txt, sitemap, and AI crawler access — so you can rule out the basics first. It can't predict whether Google will cite a page in an AI feature; nothing can.

FAQ

Does the new report show clicks from AI Overviews?

No. At launch, the Generative AI performance report shows impressions only, with no clicks, CTR, position, or query data. Clicks from AI features are still counted in the regular Performance report's Web totals, but they aren't separated out there.

Are AI impressions counted on top of my regular Search impressions?

No. Google says AI feature data continues to be included in the overall Performance report under the Web search type. The Generative AI report is a separate view of a subset of that data, so adding the two together double-counts.

Why don't I see the Generative AI report for my site?

A site needs enough impressions in AI features for the report to populate, and Google hasn't published the threshold. Confirm you're looking at the right property first — a Domain property covers every subdomain and protocol variant — and see our guide to Search Console showing no data for the other common causes.

Will excluding my site from AI features hurt my regular rankings?

Google says the Search generative AI control isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of Search. The trade-off is that you give up all impressions and traffic from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover.

Does the report include ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other AI assistants?

No. Search Console only reports on Google's own surfaces. For other engines, keep a documented sample of important prompts and record which sources each engine cites, and treat the results as directional.