Last Updated on August 31, 2026
Google has spent two years putting AI answers above your website and telling you almost nothing about what that did to your traffic. That has now started to change. Partly.
Search Console now has a generative AI performance report. It shows how often your pages appeared inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. For a lot of UK business owners, this is the first hard number they have ever had about AI search.
It is also the wrong number to celebrate.
What Google has actually released
The report sits in Search Console alongside your usual performance data. Google’s documentation says it covers two surfaces, AI Overviews and AI Mode, with a separate report for Discover. Experiments running in Search Labs are excluded.
You can group the data four ways: pages, countries, devices and dates. There is an export button.
Expect one thing before you go looking. Google’s help page states plainly that it is “rolling out this report to a subset of website owners, allowing for thorough testing before rolling it further”. If it is not in your account yet, you are either outside that group or your site has not picked up enough AI impressions to register.
What it does not tell you
This is the part most of the coverage skips.
| Metric | Normal Search report | Generative AI report |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | Yes | Yes |
| Clicks | Yes | No |
| Click-through rate | Yes | No |
| Average position | Yes | No |
| Search queries | Yes | No |
The report is impressions, and nothing else.
So Google will now confirm that it showed your business inside an AI answer. It will not tell you whether that produced a single visit.
Why the gap matters more than the number
We publish our own figures on this, and they are uncomfortable reading.
Over the three months to 28 August 2026, Microsoft Copilot and its partners cited this site 17,400 times across 127 pages. Bing sent 167 clicks in the same window. That is 104 citations for every click, and the full workings are in our published data on whether AI citations actually drive traffic.
17,400 citations. 167 clicks. Being mentioned by an AI system and being visited by a customer are now two different things. A report that counts only the mentions is measuring the half that does not pay.
Two caveats, because they matter. Those are Bing and Copilot numbers, not Google’s. Google has not released equivalent click data for AI Overviews, which is precisely the problem. And one site is one site.
The direction is what counts. Google’s AI answer now opens in full on the results page, pushing the blue links further down. More people are getting their answer without leaving Google. An impressions-only report cannot show you that, because a rising number looks like good news either way.
What to do this week
Thirty minutes, not a project.
1. Open the report. Search Console, Performance, then the generative AI report. If it is missing, you are probably not in the rollout yet.
2. Check you have not opted out. Google notes that a site can be excluded from generative AI features. If you excluded yourself at some point, you will have no data and no presence.
3. Compare it against your clicks. Export AI impressions and total Search clicks for the same dates. If AI impressions climb while clicks sit flat, you now have evidence rather than a hunch.
4. Look at the pages tab. The pages AI pulls from are usually the ones that answer a specific question plainly. That tells you what to write next, and it is a better guide than any keyword tool.
5. Do not rebuild anything yet. This is one report, in beta, showing one metric. If your enquiries are healthy, nothing here is an emergency. If they are not, the problem is more likely one of the common reasons AI cannot find your business than anything in this dashboard.
The takeaway
An impression is not a customer.
Google has handed you the top half of a sum and kept the bottom half. Use it to learn which of your pages the machines trust, then judge the result the way you judge everything else in the business, by whether the phone rings and the money lands.
If you want to check where you stand before the report reaches your account, there are free tools for testing your AI visibility that will tell you more today than an impressions chart will.
