The Search Console AI performance report shows how often your links appeared in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device, and date. Google opened it to every website on August 31, 2026. It counts impressions only, with no clicks, queries, or position, so it shows where you appear and says nothing about what that visibility earns.
That gap decides how the report should be used. This guide covers what the numbers mean, where Search Console already records AI clicks, a page-level workflow that joins the two, and the opt-out control Google shipped alongside it.
The Search Console AI performance report, explained
Google's help documentation describes the report as a view of how a site performs in generative AI features on Google Search, currently AI Overviews and AI Mode. It sits under Performance in Search Console, and a note at the top confirms the rollout reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026 (Search Console Help). Discover has a separate version that counts AI impressions when a card is scrolled into view, once per result per session (Search Console Help).
The global release closed a slow rollout. Google first showed the report to a small subset of UK site owners on June 3, 2026, and the data begins on May 18, 2026, with nothing earlier (Search Engine Roundtable). Any year-over-year comparison is out of reach until mid-2027. For context on why AI impressions and organic clicks have drifted apart, our zero-click search analysis covers the click side.
Inside the generative AI performance report: impressions, pages, and the gaps
An impression in this report means a link to your site was shown to a user inside an AI Overview or AI Mode response. The table groups by four dimensions: pages, countries, dates, and devices. Chart totals are aggregated by property, so two of your links in one AI Overview count once, while the pages table counts each page separately (Search Console Help). That is why the chart and table totals rarely match.
Four things are missing. There is no click count, no query dimension, no position, and no way to separate AI Overviews from AI Mode, since both feed one impression total. Exports carry their own quirk: values shown as ~ or - come out as zeros in the downloaded file, which can make a quiet week look like a collapse in a spreadsheet.
Google has said more is coming. A spokesperson told Search Engine Roundtable the company would “introduce additional metrics over time” (Search Engine Roundtable). Until then, treat the report as an inventory of which pages Google's AI features draw on. Our AEO playbook covers how to earn more of those appearances.
AI Overview and AI Mode clicks in the main Performance report
The clicks do exist in Search Console, folded into the standard Performance report. Google's methodology page states that clicking an external link in an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts as a click. An AI Overview occupies a single position, and every link inside it shares that position. AI Mode follows the normal results-page position rules, and a follow-up question in AI Mode is logged as a new query (Search Console Help).
So the queries and clicks are present but blended with classic blue-link traffic, with no label saying which came from an AI unit. Google's John Mueller said in September that position and impression tracking for these surfaces will “evolve over time” and that interpreting the metrics will take work on the site owner's side (Search Engine Roundtable). How AI Mode chooses sources in the first place is covered in our Google AI Mode SEO guide.
A page-level workflow for the Search Console AI performance report
Because the AI report and the main report share the pages dimension, the page is where the two can be joined. Run this once a month on a 28-day window.
- Export the AI report. Open Performance, then the generative AI report, set the last 28 days, choose the Pages tab, and export the table.
- Keep the top pages. Sort by impressions and keep the top 25 pages, plus any commercial page that appears at all.
- Match the date range. Open the main Search results report with the same 28 days and the same search type filter.
- Filter to each page. Add a page filter for one URL at a time, or a regex filter for the group, and record clicks and impressions.
- Compare the trend lines. Line up AI impressions against total clicks for each page across the last three months.
- Flag and annotate. Mark pages where AI impressions rose while clicks fell, and add a Search Console annotation for any content change you ship.
Pages with rising AI impressions and flat or falling clicks are the ones to study first. Some are answering the question so completely that nobody needs to visit, and those may need a stronger reason to click, such as a calculator, a template, or a comparison table. Session quality for the clicks that do arrive belongs in GA4, set up as described in our guide to tracking AI traffic in GA4. Deciding which pages to rework first is the kind of call our Next Best Action engagements make.
Multimodal data and false signals in AI reporting
On September 24, 2026, Google added a multimodal search type to both the Search results report and the generative AI report, covering searches made with Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads, and Chrome's “Search this image.” Mueller confirmed after checking with the team that this data was not previously counted at all (Search Engine Roundtable). The AI report now offers Web: text-based and Web: multimodal as filters (Search Console Help). Set the search type explicitly and keep it identical whenever a comparison window crosses late September.
A second caution arrived on October 2. An SEO spotted a ?st_source=ai_overview parameter on links inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, which looked like the start of real attribution. It turned out to be a Chrome extension rewriting URLs, with no involvement from Google (Search Engine Roundtable). Build reports on documented fields only. A technical SEO review is a good moment to confirm which parameters your analytics actually trusts.
The Search generative AI control and the opt-out question
The same release added a setting under Settings, Search generative AI, with three choices: include your site, exclude it, or inherit the parent property's choice. Excluding removes your links and stops your content from grounding AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover AI features, and Google says you will get no traffic or impressions from them. Google also states the control is not a ranking signal for the rest of Search, does not affect model training (that is Google-Extended), and generally takes a few days to apply, longer for some content because of caching (Search Console Help).
Exclusion carries a cost most B2B sites will feel. Google notes that content from other sites stays available and may look similar to yours, so a competitor fills the slot. Pull a full quarter of the AI report before touching the setting, and read the figures as a measure of what you would give up. Teams weighing visibility against content control can fold that decision into a broader answer engine optimization program.
Bing citation data and a monthly AI visibility report
Bing Webmaster Tools reports AI visibility from the citation side. Its AI Performance dashboard, in public preview since February 10, 2026, shows total citations, cited pages, and a sample of grounding queries across Copilot and Bing AI summaries (Microsoft Bing). In June, Bing added Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and period comparison; Citation Share is the percentage of all citations for a grounding query that went to your site (Microsoft Bing). That gives a rough query-level view that Google's report withholds.
A workable monthly report for a B2B team fits on one page: Google AI impressions by page, blended Search Console clicks for those same pages, GA4 sessions and key events from AI referrals, Bing citations and Citation Share for the top topics, and pipeline sourced from organic. Giving that page an owner and a due date is part of running the marketing technology stack. If you want help setting it up, talk to our team.
