Google now reports your AI Overviews and AI Mode visibility in Search Console

On 3 June 2026, Google added a Generative AI performance report to Search Console. For the first time, site owners can see first-party data on how often their links appear inside Google’s AI experiences — AI Overviews and AI Mode.

This is a smaller feature than the headlines suggest, and a more important one. Smaller, because it reports a single metric. More important, because of which metric, and because of who is publishing it. Until now, the standard objection to generative engine optimization was that it could not be measured — that “AI visibility” was a vibe, not a number. Google has just made it a number, in the same tool every serious site owner already opens every week.

Here is precisely what shipped, what it deliberately leaves out, and how to read it without drawing a conclusion the data cannot support.

What the report actually shows

The Generative AI performance report shows how many times links to your site were shown to a user inside a generative AI feature on Google Search. That feature set is AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google Discover’s AI features get their own separate report; Search Labs experiments are excluded.

The metric is impressions, and only impressions. You can break those impressions down by four dimensions:

• Page — which of your URLs appeared, grouped by canonical URL.
• Country — where the impressions occurred.
• Device — desktop, tablet, mobile.
• Date — daily, weekly or monthly granularity, in Pacific Time.

The chart aggregates total impressions for the property over the selected period. The table breaks them down by individual page. Standard Search Console constraints apply — the 1,000-row limit, the usual time-window handling, and a dotted line indicating that the newest data may still be preliminary.

What it deliberately leaves out

This is the part that matters for anyone using the report to make decisions.

No clicks. No click-through rate. The report does not tell you how often a user clicked from an AI response through to your site. Google’s own framing: it is “continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful,” and will “introduce additional metrics over time.” Clicks are not in the launch release.

No average position. Position is a classic-Search concept that does not map cleanly onto an AI answer, and Google did not attempt to force it.

No query dimension. You can see which pages appeared and where, but not the prompt or query that surfaced them. This is the single biggest analytical gap. It means you cannot use this report alone to answer “which questions am I winning in AI?” — only “which of my pages are being shown, somewhere, in AI features.”

The honest way to describe the report is: it is a visibility floor, not a dashboard. It confirms that AI visibility is real and measurable. It does not, on its own, close the loop to traffic or revenue.

The rollout is limited — and that is easy to misread

Google is releasing the report to a subset of website owners, with UK sites first, and only to properties that have received enough impressions in generative AI features to populate it. Global expansion is planned after testing.

Two consequences follow.

First, if you do not see the report yet, do not conclude you have zero AI visibility. It more likely means your property is not in the current cohort, or has not crossed the impression threshold Google requires to show meaningful data. Absence of the report is not absence of citations.

Second, the UK-first rollout creates a genuine information asymmetry. UK properties in the cohort can see something their competitors in other markets cannot. If you operate in the UK and you are in the rollout, that data is a head start — read it now, before everyone else gets the same view.

The opt-out toggle, and why you should almost certainly leave it off

Alongside the report, Google is testing a separate control: a toggle that blocks your content from appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features — without a ranking penalty in classic Search.

The catch is in Google’s own description: a site using the control “will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.” That is the entire point of the toggle, and it is exactly the wrong move for any brand pursuing AI visibility. Enabling it removes you from the surface you are trying to win.

There are narrow cases where it makes sense — a legal constraint, a brand-safety mandate, a publisher with a specific licensing strategy. For everyone else, the correct default is to leave it off. We expect a wave of nervous “should we block AI?” questions from brand and legal teams over the coming weeks; the answer, for a brand that wants to be cited, is no.

How to read the report without over-reading it

The report is one column in a measurement stack, not the whole stack. Used in isolation, it will mislead you in predictable ways. Used in context, it is the most credible visibility signal Google has ever given site owners. The discipline is to pair it correctly:

• For visibility trend — use the Generative AI report directly. Is your impression count in AI features rising, flat, or falling, by page and by country?
• For traffic — pair it with referrer-level analytics and server logs. The report cannot tell you who clicked; your own logs can approximate AI-source sessions.
• For query-level insight — pair it with Semrush for AI Overview keyword coverage and a manual prompt-and-screenshot layer across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. The report withholds queries; these surface them.
• For non-Google engines — the report covers Google only. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and others need dedicated citation tracking. Google’s AI surfaces are a large slice of the picture, not all of it.

The mistake to avoid is treating impressions as outcomes. An impression in an AI Overview means your link was shown inside the answer — not that a user read it, clicked it, or converted. Rising impressions are good news and a leading indicator. They are not the same as traffic, and the report’s silence on clicks is a reminder of exactly that gap.

Why this is the most important Search Console change in years for AI visibility

Strip away the caveats and one fact remains: Google has officially named, and now reports, AI Overviews and AI Mode visibility as a first-party metric. That single act does more for the credibility of generative engine optimization than any third-party tool could. The category no longer has to argue that AI visibility exists — Google is now measuring it inside the most-used site analytics tool in the world.

For brands, the practical takeaways are immediate. Check whether you are in the rollout. If you are, baseline your AI-feature impressions now, by page and country, before you make any content changes — so you have a before to compare against. Do not enable the opt-out toggle unless a hard constraint forces it. And do not let the impressions number stand in for the whole story: pair it with traffic and query data, because Google has, for now, chosen to withhold both.

The measurement era of AI visibility started with a vibe. As of June 2026, it starts with a number — and the number lives where you already look.