Search Console now shows AI visibility: what the new report can do

For a long time, AI visibility on Google was a black box. Anyone who wanted to know whether their website appeared in AI Overviews or in AI Mode had to check queries by hand or set up their own monitoring.

On 3 June 2026 Google announced dedicated generative AI performance reports for Search Console, initially for a subset of websites in the United Kingdom. The report was then expanded step by step. According to Google, it has been rolled out to websites worldwide since 31 August 2026.

This means that for the first time there is data straight from Google on how often links to your website are shown in AI answers.

The report sits with the performance reports in Search Console. In the left-hand menu, under Performance, open the report for Google Search results and then select Generative AI. The report is marked as beta. A notice with a button in the standard performance report also takes you there. There is a separate report with a similar structure for Discover, but without devices and without the search type filter.

If you cannot see the report, the Google help page names these usual reasons:

• Too few impressions: the report only appears once your website has had enough impressions in AI features.
• Rollout: Google is enabling the report gradually, so not every property has it straight away.
• Exclusion: if you have excluded your website from the AI features, you will not get any data either.

The only metric is impressions. Google counts how often links to your website were shown to users in a generative AI feature in Search. AI Overviews and AI Mode are covered. Experiments from Search Labs are not included.

Impressions can be broken down as follows:

• Pages: which URLs were shown, grouped by canonical URL
• Countries: where the searches came from
• Dates: by day, week or month, calculated in Pacific Time
• Devices: desktop, tablet or mobile

There is also a filter that distinguishes between text-based searches and multimodal searches, meaning searches with an image, for example via Google Lens or Circle to Search. At the top you select the period, from 24 hours up to several months.

Two details matter when reading the numbers. If several links to your website appear in one answer, this counts as a single impression in the total. In the pages table, each page is counted. And as in the other performance reports, the table shows a maximum of 1,000 rows. Chart and table can be exported.

As useful as the new figures are, the report only answers the question of whether you are visible. This information is missing:

• Clicks and click-through rate: you cannot see whether an impression brought visitors.
• Queries: you cannot see for which questions your page was shown.
• Position: you cannot see where in the answer your link appeared.
• Other AI systems: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot are not included. The report only covers Google.

An impression also says nothing about how your brand is presented in the answer: whether correctly, completely and in comparison with competitors.

What does this look like in a real project? We analysed the report for a large German organisation with many advice and service pages. Period: 29 June to 28 September 2026, search type Web (text).

• Scale: more than 800,000 impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. For comparison: the regular performance report shows around 3.4 million impressions and around 260,000 clicks in the same period.
• Devices and countries: 51 per cent mobile, 48 per cent desktop, 1 per cent tablet. 83 per cent of impressions come from Germany, the rest is spread across 217 other countries.
• How it counts: the pages table adds up to 1.23 million impressions, around 50 per cent more than the total. If Google shows several pages of the same website in one answer, each page is counted individually, but the website as a whole only once.
• Concentration: the ten strongest pages account for 31 per cent of page impressions, the 100 strongest for 72 per cent.
• Content: pages that answer a specific question are at the top. Help and knowledge articles alone account for 36 per cent of page impressions.
• Homepage: it brings 35 per cent of all clicks from regular search, but only 2 per cent of the AI impressions. The page with the most AI impressions, by contrast, is only in sixth place for clicks.
• Trend: from Monday to Thursday there are around 9,500 impressions a day on average, about a quarter fewer at the weekend. The daily average in September was 10 per cent above August, and the last day of the period was the strongest at around 12,000.
• Multimodal: for searches with an image, the report only shows values from the second week of September, 246 impressions in total.

Three things stand out. First, Google mainly cites pages that answer a question clearly, not the pages that get the most clicks in regular search. Second, the total and the pages table cannot simply be added up. Third, the pages table ends at 1,000 rows. For large websites you therefore do not see all pages.

Together with the report, Google introduced a setting that lets you exclude your website from the generative AI features in Search. You will find it in Search Console under Settings > Search generative AI.

According to the Google help page:

• The setting affects AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover.
• It is not a ranking signal. Your pages can still appear in the regular search results.
• It has nothing to do with the training of AI models. Google-Extended in robots.txt remains responsible for that.
• According to Google, an exclusion generally takes effect after a few days. Some content may stay visible longer because of caching.

Our assessment: for most companies, excluding the site is not a good idea. If you are not in the AI answers, you leave that space to your competitors. It can make sense for publishers and data providers whose business model depends on the click to their own content.

1. Check availability: open the report in every property. If it is missing, the reason is usually too few impressions.
2. Find your strongest pages: sort by impressions. Google already cites these pages. Keep them up to date and expand them.
3. Compare with clicks: put the AI impressions next to the clicks from the regular performance report. Pages with many AI impressions and falling clicks deserve a closer look.
4. Watch changes: after a revision, check whether the impressions of the page rise. This teaches you which kind of content gets cited.
5. Export regularly: save the data every month. This builds your own time series.
6. Close the gaps: add monitoring with fixed prompts to the report. Only this shows for which questions your brand is mentioned, how it is presented and what things look like in ChatGPT and other systems. We describe how this works on our AI monitoring page.

The report is an important step. For the first time, AI visibility on Google can be shown with Google’s own data, and for every single page. That helps in every conversation about whether Generative Engine Optimisation is worth it.

At the same time it remains a partial picture. Without queries and clicks you do not know for which topics you are visible and what that visibility delivers. Anyone who wants to manage AI visibility therefore needs three sources: the new report for reach on Google, prompt monitoring for content and competition, and web analytics for the traffic from AI systems.