Google finished the global rollout of its Search Console AI performance report and the companion “Search generative AI” control on August 31, 2026. The company confirmed the date in an update to its June 3 announcement by Mrinalini Loew, GM of Google Search Ecosystem, which first described both features during a UK-only test. Every property can now see AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions as a separate view, and every owner can switch their site out of those features from Settings. What you still cannot see is clicks or queries.
- The Generative AI performance report (Search) shows impressions only, split by page, country, device and date, for AI Overviews and AI Mode. No clicks, no CTR, no queries, no position.
- A separate Generative AI performance report (Discover) covers AI features in Discover, with page, country and date but no device dimension.
- The Search generative AI control (Settings > Search generative AI) has two states, Include and Exclude. Exclusion takes effect within one to two days and is not a ranking signal.
- Google says it will “introduce additional metrics over time.” The UK’s CMA requires click data and page-level controls by March 2027.
- Third-party AI visibility tools still win on prompts, competitors and non-Google engines; Search Console wins on being Google’s own data.
What Google announced
Two things shipped together. The first is the Generative AI performance report (Search), which appears as an expandable section under the Search results performance report. Google’s Search Central post by Hillel Maoz and Moshe Samet framed it as a dedicated view of data that was already blended into the Web search type. AI Overview and AI Mode impressions were always inside your Performance totals; you just could not separate them.
The report counts “how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature,” according to the help page. Two results from the same site inside one AI feature count as a single impression. Dates are in Pacific time by day, week or month, the standard 1,000-row cap applies, and Search Labs experiments are excluded. The most recent days show as a dotted line because they are preliminary.
The second feature is the Search generative AI control. Loew’s post describes it as letting owners “decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses” in generative AI Search features. It is a property-level toggle covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover; child properties can inherit the parent setting, and the help page says exclusion lands within one to two days.
| Feature | What it covers | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Generative AI performance report (Search) | Impressions by page, country, device, date for AI Overviews and AI Mode | No clicks, CTR, position or queries; no Labs data |
| Generative AI performance report (Discover) | Impressions by page, country, date for AI features in Discover | No device dimension; no clicks |
| Search generative AI control | Include (default) or Exclude the whole property from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover AI features | Not a ranking signal; does not block AI training (use Google-Extended); does not remove you from Search (use noindex); no page-level option yet |
What it means for SEOs
This is the first time Google has told site owners, in its own interface, how often their pages surface in AI answers. I have been estimating this for clients from third-party citation scrapes for two years, so a first-party number is welcome. The catch is that impressions without clicks answers the wrong question. You can now prove you appear in AI Overviews; you still cannot prove that appearing is worth anything.
The regulatory backdrop matters. The UK Competition and Markets Authority imposed conduct requirements on Google in June 2026 that mandate impressions, click-throughs and click-through rates for AI features, plus page-level controls by March 2027. Google’s promise of more metrics is not just goodwill; the clock is running. My expectation is that clicks arrive for everyone at once, because Google has never run a UK-only Search Console.
On the control itself: I would not exclude a commercial site. The CTR data on AI Overviews is bad, but a cited link still beats no link. Exclusion makes sense for publishers whose content is the product, or for an A/B test on a subdomain to measure what AI features cost you, which child-property inheritance now makes practical.
The GEO work most of us have been doing on faith now has a scoreboard, at least for Google. A page rewritten for direct answers in July that shows a rising AI impressions line in August is the first closed feedback loop this discipline has had.
How it compares with third-party AI visibility tools
Search Console overlaps with only a slice of what Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit or Ahrefs Brand Radar do. Exploding Topics’ July 2026 comparison lists Semrush at $99/month standalone and Brand Radar at $199/month per platform or $699/month for all. Those tools track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, show competitor share of voice, and monitor custom prompts. Search Console does none of that, but it has the actual count, from Google, of your URLs in AI Overviews and AI Mode, which no scraper can reproduce. Use the tools for prompts and competitors and Search Console as ground truth; our AI SEO tools roundup covers the paid options.
What to do this week
- Open Performance > Search results and expand the Generative AI section. If it is missing, the property may not have enough AI impressions yet; check a larger domain property.
- Export the Pages table for the last 28 days and join it against regular Search clicks per URL. Pages with high AI impressions and falling clicks are your cannibalisation list.
- Confirm the Search generative AI control reads “Include” on every property, including child properties set to inherit. A stray Exclude on a subdomain will zero out impressions and hide the problem.
- Annotate August 31 in your reporting so nobody mistakes the new view for a traffic change. The totals in the main report did not move.
- Before building any month-over-month AI chart, remember preliminary data shifts for several days; our Search Console tutorial covers safe date comparisons.
What we don’t know yet
Whether the Search Analytics API will expose the AI dimensions. Whether Google will ever report position inside an AI Overview, or only presence. When clicks arrive outside the UK, and whether page-level exclusion ships globally in March 2027 or only where the CMA order applies.
FAQ
Does the Search Console AI report show clicks from AI Overviews?
No. As of September 2026 the Generative AI performance report shows impressions only, broken down by page, country, device and date. Google has said additional metrics will follow.
Are AI Mode impressions in Search Console?
Yes. The Search version of the report covers both AI Overviews and AI Mode, and those impressions remain inside your normal Web search totals. The new view separates them; it does not add to them.
Will excluding my site from AI features hurt my rankings?
Google says the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal elsewhere in Search. You do lose the AI impressions and any clicks they carried; our zero-click search guide covers that trade-off.
