Search Console's AI report, and what to tell clients about it.

Search Console's Generative AI performance report counts impressions: how many times links to a site were shown to someone in a generative AI feature on Google Search. For Search, that means AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Google says the reports reached all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026, and a separate version covers Discover.

The figures can be grouped four ways: by page, by country, by device and by date.

Most mistakes with this report come from expecting it to behave like the main Performance report.

• Clicks

  It counts how often a link was shown, not whether anyone followed it. Visits from AI answers have to be measured in analytics, where many arrive looking like ordinary search traffic.

• Queries

  It groups by page, country, device and date, not by query, so it says where a client appeared rather than what was asked.

• Position

  There is no ranking. An AI answer is not a list of ten results, so a position would not mean what it means for a classic result.

• A separate total

  These impressions are already inside the Web figures of the main Performance report. Adding the two together counts the same impressions twice.

Treat it as a visibility measure that answers one question: are this client's pages being shown inside AI answers more often or less often than before?

• A trend, not a total

  Show AI feature impressions over time beside the client's overall search impressions, so the share from AI features is visible without being added on top.

• The pages that appear

  List the pages with the most AI feature impressions. That shows which content the AI features draw on, which is useful for planning even without clicks.

• Visits beside it

  Put visits measured in analytics next to the impressions, labelled as a separate measure. Do not divide one by the other: the report gives no clicks, so any rate built that way mixes two sources.

The report lives in the Search Console interface. If your reporting reads Search Console through its API, check whether these figures are available that way before promising them in a dashboard, and say so in the report if they are copied in by hand.

Keep a monthly copy either way. A comparison a year from now should not depend on how much history the interface chooses to show.

If the report's figures are copied into a spreadsheet each month, that file is a source like any other. It can be ingested and land in your own data warehouse beside the client's Search Console and analytics data, so AI visibility and visits sit in one place.

Syncs add to the tables rather than replacing them, so the monthly figures you record build into a history you hold yourself rather than one the interface holds for you.