Guide 15 · Measurement
What the Search Console Generative AI report shows, and what it cannot
Search Console now has a report for Google’s AI features. It counts one thing: how often a link to your site was shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It has no clicks, no queries, and no way to tell the two features apart. This page covers what the report measures, where the same traffic already sits in your other reports, and what our own report showed. This site got 26 Search impressions and 2 of them in AI features, and none of the 2 went to our original research pages.
What does the Generative AI performance report measure?
Impressions, and nothing else. Google’s help page defines them as “how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.” The report has no clicks, no click-through rate, no position and no queries.
It covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together, and you cannot split one from the other. Search Labs experiments are not included. Discover has its own separate generative AI report. You can group the data by page, country, device and date. Dates are in Pacific Time, the table stops at 1,000 rows, and the newest days are preliminary. They show as a dotted line and can still change.
| Question you want answered | Generative AI report | Answers it? |
|---|---|---|
| Did Google show my pages in AI Overviews or AI Mode? | Impressions by page, country, device and date | Yes |
| Was it AI Overviews or AI Mode? | The two are reported as one | No |
| For which searches? | No query data | No |
| Did anyone click? | No clicks or CTR | No |
| Was my page cited, or only linked somewhere in the panel? | An impression counts a link being shown | No |
| What about ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot? | Google surfaces only | No |
Where is it, and why might you not see it?
Open Performance in Search Console. The report is a tab under the main Search results report. There is also a banner above the table that reads “Get more details on your site’s performance in generative AI features on Google Search.” Google announced it on 3 June 2026 and finished the rollout to all sites on 31 August 2026.
If it is missing, the usual reason is volume. Google only shows the report once a site has enough AI impressions. John Mueller put it this way: these reports “are only shown if there’s sufficient data to display.” In practice that bar can be low. Our report appeared with a total of two impressions.
Is AI Overview traffic still in the normal Performance report?
Yes, and this is the part most write-ups skip. Google counts AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the ordinary Performance report, under the Web search type. Clicking an external link in either one “counts as a click.” An AI Overview takes a single position, and every link in it gets that position. AI Mode positions work the same way as a normal results page. A follow-up question is counted as a new query.
So the clicks the new report leaves out are not missing from Search Console. They are mixed into your normal Web numbers, and nothing labels them. Google Analytics does not separate them either. Its AI Assistant channel is built for referrals from assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and Google has not said it includes AI Overviews or AI Mode. Those clicks come from a Google results page, so expect them under Organic Search.
| Report | AI Overviews and AI Mode | What you can separate |
|---|---|---|
| Search Console: Generative AI report | Impressions only | Pages, countries, devices, dates |
| Search Console: Performance, Web | Impressions and clicks, mixed with classic results | Nothing that isolates AI features |
| Google Analytics 4 | Sessions from a Google results page | Organic Search, not the AI Assistant channel |
What did our own report show?
This site is a few weeks old, so treat these as a worked example, not a benchmark. Both reports below cover the same dates, with data to 21 September 2026.
| Page | All Search impressions | AI feature impressions |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage | 7 | 2 |
| /results/ | 7 | 1 |
| Six Plugin Visibility Index runs (original data) | 72 | 0 |
| Retrievability check tool | 8 | 0 |
| Property total (chart) | 26 | 2 |
Two things stand out. First, the pages that earn most of our ordinary impressions got none of the AI ones. These are the index runs, with 72 impressions between them. Google showed the homepage and the results page in its AI features, not the research. Two AI impressions are far too few to call a pattern. It is the thing to watch as the numbers grow.
Second, the page rows do not add up to the total. The AI report’s pages add up to 3 while its chart says 2. In the main report the gap is larger: the pages listed above alone add up to 94 impressions, against a property total of 26. This is expected, not an error. Google counts totals per property, so one search that shows three of your pages is one impression. Page rows count each page separately. Google’s help page warns that chart and table totals can differ for this reason. Do not add up page rows and call the result your AI visibility.
What changed on 24 September: the multimodal split
Update, 25 September 2026. The day after this page went up, Google added a new search type to Search Console. The Web search type is now split in two: Text-based and Multimodal. Multimodal covers searches that start from an image rather than typed words:
- Google Lens
- Circle to Search on Android
- Image uploads to Google Search
- Chrome’s “Search this image”
Three things follow for anyone reading the reports on this page.
The default view changed. When we opened our own Performance report on 25 September, the filter read “Search type: Web (text)”. Searches that started from a photo or a screenshot are not in that view. You have to pick Multimodal in the Search type filter to see them.
Multimodal traffic has no queries. Google says text query data is not available, because these searches mostly use images. You get clicks, impressions, pages, countries and devices, but the Queries tab is empty. That is a new blind spot of its own: you can see that a page was found, not what the person was looking at.
The Generative AI report has the same split. The Search type filter there now offers Text-based and Multimodal too. That report already shows impressions only, so a multimodal view of it is impressions by page, country, device and date, with no clicks and no queries.
The earlier section still holds: AI Overview and AI Mode clicks sit inside the Web search type. They are now divided by how the search started. Google’s announcement does not say whether the Search Console API carries the new type yet.
Our own numbers, last three months, data to 23 September 2026: Multimodal 0 impressions and 0 clicks in the Performance report, and 0 impressions in the Generative AI report. Web (text) had 28 impressions and 1 click. The Generative AI report had 3 impressions, spread across 7 page rows. A site made of research tables and text, with no product photos, should expect a zero here. The filter matters most where the photo is the product: shops, recipes, property listings, anything people point a camera at.
How do you read it without fooling yourself?
- Compare each page with itself. Divide a page’s AI impressions by its impressions in the main Web report for the same dates. That share is more useful than the raw count, which mostly tracks how often people search.
- Use the property total, not the sum of pages. Report the chart total when you mean the whole site. Use page rows only to compare pages.
- Read weeks, not days. The most recent days are preliminary and can change within hours. Small sites will see single impressions come and go.
- Do not count impressions as citations. An impression means a link to your site was shown somewhere in the AI panel. It does not tell you whether the answer used your page or where in the answer it appeared.
- Measure the other engines yourself. ChatGPT and Perplexity have no equivalent report. You need your own prompt runs with varied phrasings, because an identical prompt returns a cached source list, and the tracking tools share that problem.
Should you use the Search generative AI control?
Search Console also added a setting under Settings, AI controls, called Search generative AI. It is set to Include by default. If you switch it to exclude, Google says links to your site and your content “won’t appear in Search generative AI features”. That covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover. Google says the setting “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal” anywhere else in Search. It also does not affect training, which is still controlled through Google-Extended. The change usually takes a few days to apply, and it is set per property.
The setting came after the UK Competition and Markets Authority required Google to let publishers opt out of AI features and to report impressions, clicks and click-through rates from those features. Page-level controls are due by March 2027. For now Google has delivered the switch and the impressions. It has not delivered the clicks.
Our call for a plugin or micro-SaaS vendor: keep it on Include. Your buyers ask these features which plugin to use, and excluding your site takes you out of that answer. The report gives you no click data that could show you would gain anything by leaving. News publishers who lose visits to AI summaries face a different trade-off, and this page does not cover it. We have left softrecs.com on Include.
What this page cannot tell you
Our figures come from one young site with very few impressions, so they show how the report behaves, not what is typical. The definitions above are Google’s own and can change. The report says nothing about whether an AI answer used your content, and nothing about engines other than Google.
What would change this page: Google adding clicks, queries or a split between AI Overviews and AI Mode to the report, which the CMA’s requirement points toward. I will note any change here with the date. I will also re-check whether our research pages start to appear in AI features as the site gets more impressions.
How this was made: Google’s definitions come from its Search Console help pages and Search Central documentation. Our figures come from this site’s own Search Console property, read on 23 September 2026, and again on 25 September 2026 for the multimodal update. Drafted with an AI assistant (Claude) and reviewed by Alauddin Chowdhury. Method and AI use.
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