Search Console's generative AI performance report: what it shows and what it misses
Search Console's generative AI performance report counts one thing: impressions, the number of times Google showed a link to your site in AI Overviews or AI Mode. You can group them by page, country, device and date, and filter text searches apart from image searches such as Google Lens. As of 17 October 2026 the report has no clicks, no queries and no position, and it covers those two Google features only, not ChatGPT, Perplexity or any other assistant. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted, but only inside the Performance report's Web totals, and none of the Search appearance filters Google lists separates them. Beside the report sits the Search generative AI control, which includes your site by default, or follows its parent property if it has one. Read the report page by page, next to the Performance report and your analytics, and treat it as a record of where Google showed you, not of what the answer said about you.
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Google announced the reports on 3 June 2026, first for a subset of sites, and they reached every site worldwide by 31 August 2026. Everything below about the report comes from Google's own documentation, re-read on 17 October 2026, because Google has said it may add metrics over time.
What the report counts
| Part of the report | What Google documents | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | Each time Google showed a user a link to your site in one of its generative AI features in Search | The only metric the report carries |
| Features covered | AI Overviews and AI Mode, a list Google expects to update | Search Labs experiments are left out |
| Pages | The final URL the feature linked to, after any redirects | Most data is credited to the canonical URL, not to a duplicate |
| Countries | The country the search came from | |
| Devices | Desktop, tablet or mobile | |
| Dates | Days, weeks or months, in Pacific Time; the announcement also lists hourly views | The newest data is preliminary, drawn as a dotted line, and can still change within hours |
| Search type | Web: text-based, or Web: multimodal, which covers Google Lens, Circle to Search, uploaded images and Chrome image search | |
| Export | The chart and the table both download | Values shown as ~ or - arrive as zeros |
Sources: Google's help article on the report and the announcement, read 17 October 2026.
Two counting rules decide how you read the totals. The chart counts by property: if two of your pages appear in the same AI answer, the chart records one impression, and adding a URL filter switches it to counting by URL. The table counts by property too when you group by country, device or date, but by page when you group by page. Add up the page rows and you can get more than the chart total; Google says differences of that kind usually come down to aggregation. The table also inherits the Performance report's usual limits, among them a cap of 1,000 rows.
Discover has a generative AI report of its own. There the page dimension records the page that supplied the information, not the page a reader lands on, every impression is counted per page, and there is no device dimension.
What the report does not show
| Not in the report | Where it lives, if anywhere |
|---|---|
| Clicks | In the Performance report's Web search type: a click on an external link in an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts as a click. Those clicks sit in the same totals as every other Web click, and Google's list of Search appearance values has no entry for AI Overviews or AI Mode (checked 17 October 2026). |
| Queries | Nowhere in this report, which has no query dimension. The Performance report lists queries, but Google documents no filter that marks which of them showed an AI feature. In AI Mode, a follow-up question counts as a new query. |
| Position | Not reported here. In the Performance report an AI Overview takes a single position and every link inside it shares that position, while AI Mode follows the usual results-page rules. |
| What the answer said | Nothing on whether you were named, recommended or described accurately. That takes your own prompt checks. |
| Other engines | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and the Gemini app are outside Search Console. |
| Access through the API | The Search Analytics API reference (updated 11 August 2026) offers types for web, image, video, news, Discover and Google News, and none for generative AI features. Exporting from the report is the documented route. |
Sources: Google's help on how impressions, position and clicks are counted, on Performance report dimensions and on the report itself, and the API reference, all read 17 October 2026.
The fourth and fifth rows are where most of the work is. Seeing what the answers say takes your own prompt checks, the same buyer questions put to every engine on a schedule; our guide to measuring brand visibility in ChatGPT and AI answers sets out the panel, the scoring sheet and the free platform data to pair with it.
The Search generative AI control beside it
The control lives in Search Console under Settings, then Search generative AI, and it covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover (Google's help, read 17 October 2026). It has three settings:
- Include my site's links and content. The default for every property.
- Exclude my site's links and content. No links, no content used to ground answers, and no impressions or traffic from those features.
- Inherit control from parent. The default for any property that has a parent property.
Inheritance is the part that is easy to miss. A property takes its setting from the closest parent property that has stopped inheriting, and if none has, from its top-level domain property. A company may have a domain property for example.com alongside properties its docs or support teams verified on their own, such as docs.example.com or https://example.com/blog/. Each of those follows its nearest configured parent, normally the domain property, unless someone changed it. Owners of a child property can set their own value at any time, and owners of the top-level domain property see a notification on the control page when a child overrides it. So check the setting on the domain property first, then look for that notice.
Excluding is a heavy step for a commercial site, and three details from the same help page bound it. It is not a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search. It does not affect AI training; Google points to Google-Extended for that, a token our guide to AI crawlers and robots.txt sets beside the other vendors' agents. And Google puts the delay at a few days in general, with content removed one to two days after the setting takes effect and some held longer by caching. The page-level options (nosnippet, max-snippet, data-nosnippet) are covered in our guide to getting cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Google suggests the report as a way to judge how a change to the control might affect your traffic. The report counts impressions, though, so the traffic side of that judgement has to come from the Performance report and your analytics.
How to read it alongside the Performance report and analytics
A page-level join answers more than any of the three sources alone.
- Export the generative AI report grouped by page for a fixed period, such as the last 28 days.
- Export the Performance report for the same dates, Web search type, grouped by page, with clicks and impressions.
- Work out each page's share. Divide its AI feature impressions by its Web impressions. Both tables count by page when grouped by page, so the rows compare; the chart totals, counted by property, do not.
- Add the analytics side. For the same landing pages, take sessions and key events from source google and medium organic, the filter Google's own guide to using Search Console and Analytics together applies to Google Search traffic. Search Console dates run on Pacific Time, so line the periods up.
- Read the patterns, page by page.
| What you see | What it may mean | What to check next |
|---|---|---|
| A page's AI impressions rise while its clicks stay flat | Google shows it in AI answers more often without sending more visits | Run the page's buying questions in AI Mode and see whether the answer settles them without a click |
| A few pages take most of the AI impressions | Those are the pages Google's AI features reach for in your category | Link to them from related pages, and give other buying pages the same specificity |
| A commercial page never appears | It was not linked in those features during the period | Check its indexing and snippet eligibility in URL Inspection, the control, and any nosnippet rules |
We have found no Google documentation of a separate referrer or campaign tag for clicks from AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Google's own guide treats Google Search visits in analytics as source google, medium organic. In analytics, then, expect a visit from an AI Overview to look like any other organic visit from Google, which is why the join runs through landing pages rather than traffic sources. Google also says it has seen clicks from results pages with AI Overviews be higher quality, by which it means visitors tend to stay on the site longer. The engagement data from step 4 is where you can test that claim for your own pages.
When the report is missing
Google gives two usual reasons: the site has not had enough impressions in these features yet, or it has been excluded through the control. A missing report is therefore worth a look at Settings before anything else.
Questions people ask about the report
Does the generative AI report in Search Console show clicks?
No. As of 17 October 2026 it reports impressions only. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Performance report, in its Web search type, together with every other Web click.
Can you see which queries showed your site in an AI Overview?
Not in this report, which has no query dimension. The Performance report lists queries, but Google documents no filter that isolates AI Overview or AI Mode appearances.
Can you pull the report through the Search Console API?
The Search Analytics API reference, last updated 11 August 2026, lists no type for generative AI features. The report's export, for the chart and the table, is the documented route.
Does excluding your site from Search generative AI features affect rankings?
Google says the control plays no part in ranking or inclusion elsewhere in Search. It does remove your links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative AI features, along with the impressions and traffic they bring.
How this guide was researched
Every statement about the report and the control comes from Google's own pages, read on 17 October 2026: the announcement of 3 June 2026, the help articles on the Search report, the Discover report, the Search generative AI control, how impressions, position and clicks are counted and Performance report dimensions, the AI features page in Google's Search documentation, the guide to Search Console and Analytics and the Search Analytics API reference. Where the documentation is silent, on clicks, queries and API access for this report, the guide says so with the date, because Google has said it may add metrics.
The Rank Master gets B2B SaaS companies found in Google and recommended by the seven AI engines buyers now ask first: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Every plan puts Search Console alongside AI data, so clicks and citations sit side by side, with a live dashboard and a monthly report, published pricing and no annual lock-in. Book a 30-minute call to see what the engines say about your category today and get a plain answer on whether we can help.