What Search Console's Generative AI Report Does and Does Not Tell You

Google's generative AI performance report gives you one metric: impressions. It counts how many times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, grouped by page, country, device and date. There are no queries, no clicks and no average position in it, and the two AI surfaces are not separated. It is a real measurement, and it is narrower than most people reporting on it assume.

The report was introduced on 3 June 2026 to a subset of properties and rolled out to all sites worldwide on 31 August 2026, alongside a control that lets an owner keep a site out of those features entirely. For most brands this is the first owned, first-party number they have ever had for AI visibility. It is worth understanding precisely, because the gap between what it measures and what a client thinks it measures is where bad reporting gets made.

What the generative AI performance report actually contains

Google's help documentation for the report is short and unusually literal. Impressions are defined as how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. That is the whole metric set.

Four dimensions are documented:

• Pages, which group data by the final URL linked by a generative AI feature after any redirects
• Countries, by where the search originated
• Dates, by day, week or month
• Devices, split into desktop, tablet and mobile

The generative AI capabilities covered are AI Overviews and AI Mode. Data from Search Labs experiments is excluded.

The page dimension is the useful one, and it is more useful than it looks. Because it resolves to the final URL after redirects, it tells you which specific assets a generative surface reaches for when it answers something in your category. That is a content signal you can act on without ever seeing a query.

What the report does not tell you

Four absences matter, and all four get papered over in agency decks.

No queries. The four dimensions above do not include one for search terms. You can see that a page was shown four hundred times last month and have no idea what people asked to get there. Query-level demand still has to be mined from the main Search results performance report, which mixes AI and classic appearances together.

No clicks, no click-through rate, no position. The report carries impressions and nothing else. This is the single most misread part of it, because it is easy to conclude that AI features send no measurable clicks at all. They do. Those clicks are simply counted elsewhere.

No split between AI Overviews and AI Mode. Both capabilities feed one impression count. When the line goes up, a Google surface is showing your links more often. Which surface is not a question this report answers.

No separate audience. Google states that the report includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report for Search results. It is a filtered view of numbers you already had. Adding AI impressions on top of your Search total double counts them, and in September 2026 that is the most common error in AI visibility reporting.

Why your AI Overviews clicks are already in the main performance report

The main Search results performance report has covered AI features for a while, and Google documents the counting rules for them. Standard impression rules apply to AI Overviews. Clicking a link to an external page in an AI Overview counts as a click, and the same is true in AI Mode.

Position is where it gets interesting. Google documents that an AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and that all links inside it are assigned that same position. Links in AI Mode follow the same methodology as a normal results page.

The practical consequence is that your average position can move because the mix of AI and classic appearances changed, not because your rankings did. If you report average position to a client without that caveat, you will eventually have to explain a swing you did not cause.

The catch is isolation. Google's own help pages do not document an AI Overviews or AI Mode value in the Search appearance filter, and the generative AI report is the surface Google points to for pulling these impressions apart. So the shape of the data available today is: clicks that exist but cannot be attributed to AI, and AI impressions that can be isolated but carry no clicks. Build your reporting around that constraint instead of pretending it is not there.

How to build a usable baseline from impressions only

One metric is enough to run a defensible measurement programme, as long as you stop asking it for things it cannot give.

1. Export the page dimension every month and keep the file. The report is a rolling window, so the archive is yours to build. A baseline you did not save is a baseline you do not have.
2. Track the count of distinct pages appearing, not just total impressions. Total impressions move with Google's own rollout of AI features across queries. The number of your URLs eligible enough to be pulled in is closer to something you control.
3. Segment by device from the start. AI surfaces do not appear identically across desktop and mobile, and an aggregate line hides the shift.
4. Pair it with a manual prompt log. Because there is no query dimension, the only way to know what is being asked is to ask. Keep a fixed list of prompts, run them on a schedule, and record which sources come back. That log is what turns page-level impressions into a story.
5. Never combine the two reports into one total. Report AI impressions as a share of Search impressions, not as an addition to them.

If you want the mechanical parts of this running on a schedule, we wrote up how to program an AI agent to run GEO maintenance, including the guardrails that stop it from inventing numbers when a report comes back empty.

The setting that can zero out the report entirely

Before anyone concludes that a site has an AI visibility problem, check the setting. Search Console has a Search generative AI control under Settings, with two values.

Include is the default. The site's content can appear in Search generative AI features, show up as links, help ground AI responses, and receive impressions and traffic from them. Exclude prevents the site's content from being visible to users in those features, including being linked within them. Google notes that content is excluded within one to two days after the control goes live, although some content may take longer because of caching and propagation.

The part that catches people is inheritance. By default a property inherits its control from the closest parent property that has changed its own control to stop inheriting, and a property with no manually configured parent inherits from the top-level domain property. On a large site with many verified properties, one person can change one setting and silently affect the rest.

Google's guidance on AI features is also worth reading before blaming your markup. To be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and Google states there are no additional technical requirements. Being eligible is not the same as being chosen, which is why nobody credible sells guaranteed placement in an AI answer. There is no way to pay for one either.

For the wider picture of how these surfaces differ from each other, see our AEO guide for Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google.

Common questions

Does the Search Console generative AI report show clicks?

No. Google's help page for the report describes a single metric: impressions, defined as how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. There is no clicks column, no click-through rate and no average position in this report. Clicks from AI features do exist, but they are counted inside the main Search results performance report rather than here.

Can I see which queries triggered my AI Overviews impressions?

Not in this report. Google documents four dimensions for it: pages, countries, dates and devices. Queries are not among them, so you can see that a given URL was shown in a generative AI feature 400 times last month without ever learning what people asked. Query-level demand still has to come from the main Search results performance report, which mixes AI and classic results together.

Are AI Overviews and AI Mode reported separately?

No. The report covers both generative AI capabilities and presents them as one impression count. A rise in the number tells you a Google surface is showing your links more often, not which surface. If a client asks whether the growth came from AI Mode specifically, the honest answer in September 2026 is that Search Console does not break it out.

Is this data also counted in my normal Search Console numbers?

Yes. Google states that the generative AI performance report includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report for Search results. It is a filtered view of traffic you already have, not a new audience sitting on top of it. Adding the two figures together double counts, and it is the most common mistake in AI visibility reporting right now.

Why does my generative AI report show no data at all?

Google lists a few reasons. The site may not have received enough impressions in generative AI features yet, or the property may have been excluded from Search generative AI features through the control in Search Console settings. Search Console also excludes data from Search Labs experiments. Check the Search generative AI setting before concluding that the visibility problem is a content problem.

What position does a link inside an AI Overview get in the main report?

Google documents that an AI Overview occupies a single position in search results and that all links inside it are assigned that same position. Links in AI Mode follow the same methodology as a normal Google Search results page. This matters when you compare average position month over month, because the mix of AI and classic appearances moves the average independently of anything you changed.