Google Search Console now has a dedicated report for generative AI, and as of 31 August 2026 it is live on every website worldwide. It shows you impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. It shows you no clicks, no click-through rate, no average position and no queries.

That is the whole feature, and it is genuinely useful. What is less useful is most of the commentary around it, which has landed on two conclusions that are not correct: that Google is not counting your AI clicks, and that these impressions are new traffic you were not getting credit for. Neither is true, and both will mislead you if you build reporting on them.

Here is what the report actually measures, what it deliberately leaves out, and what to do with it.

What shipped, and when

Google announced the generative AI performance reports on 3 June 2026 as a Search Console beta. The rollout was phased through the summer. On 31 August 2026 it reached all websites worldwide, alongside a property-level control that lets a site remove itself from generative AI surfaces entirely.

If you have not looked yet, it sits in Search Console under the Performance section as a separate view from the standard Search results report. There are two of them: one for generative AI features on Search, and one for generative AI features in Discover.

What the report shows

Per Google's own documentation, the Search version of the report covers impressions for two surfaces: AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google defines the metric plainly. Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.

You can break those impressions down by page, country, device and date, with hourly, daily, weekly and monthly granularity. That page-level view is the useful part, because it shows which of your pages Google's AI reaches for, and it is usually not the pages you would guess.

Here is the report on our own property, so you can see the shape of it rather than take our word for it.

Google Search Console Generative AI features report for bizloc8.ai, showing a single Total impressions card reading 878 across three months, with Pages, Countries, Devices and Days tabs and no clicks column
The Generative AI features report in Search Console, 10 September 2026. Note what is not there: one metric card, and no clicks, CTR or position beside it.

That single card is the entire interface. In the standard Search results report you get four toggles across the top for clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. Here there is one, and it is switched on because there is nothing else to switch. The tabs underneath are Pages, Countries, Devices and Days, which is exactly the breakdown Google documents, and there is no Queries tab at all.

Two limitations worth knowing before you build a report on it. Daily values in the chart can be omitted if they fall below a display threshold, though Google says they are still included in the totals. And the standard Search Console constraints still apply, including the 1,000-row limit and preliminary data for the most recent days that can change within hours.

What it does not show, and why that matters

There are no clicks in this report. No click-through rate. No average position. No query data. You can see that Google's AI showed a link to your page. You cannot see whether anyone clicked it, or what they had searched for.

For a channel where the entire argument is about whether AI answers send traffic or absorb it, that is a significant omission. It means the report can tell you that your visibility went up, and cannot tell you whether that was worth anything.

The distinction that matters

The report does not show clicks. That is not the same as Google not counting them. Those two statements get treated as one, and they are not.

The part most coverage gets wrong

Google has been counting clicks from AI features all along. Its documentation on AI features and your website states that sites appearing in AI features are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, and are reported on in the Performance report within the Web search type.

So the clicks exist in your data today. They are sitting inside your Web totals, mixed in with ordinary blue-link clicks, and there is no way to pull them apart. The gap is not that Google refuses to count them. The gap is that Google will not let you separate them.

The second misread follows from the same place. Google's help documentation for the generative AI report says it includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report. In other words these impressions are a slice of numbers you already had, not a new channel stacked on top of them. If you add your generative AI impressions to your Search totals and report the sum, you are double counting, and your visibility will look better than it is.

How to read it correctly

Treat the generative AI report as a filter on your existing Search data, not an addition to it. The right question is what share of my Search impressions came from AI surfaces, not how many extra impressions did AI give me.

Why this matters for local search

Local results have not been exempt from this. Practitioners tracking Google's local changes logged AI Overviews appearing on local searches during August 2026, sometimes drawing on thin sources such as listicles rather than the businesses themselves.

If you run a multi-location business, that is the scenario worth checking. The page-level breakdown in the new report is the fastest way to see whether Google's AI is citing your location pages, your service pages, or neither. A brand whose AI impressions concentrate entirely on blog content while its location pages register nothing has a structural problem, not a content volume problem.

It is also worth pairing this with the fundamentals, because AI answers about a business still lean on the same underlying data. If your Google Business Profile carries the wrong category or inconsistent details, that is what gets summarised back to the searcher. The measurement is new. The inputs are not.

What to actually do with it

Set a baseline now, before you change anything

Export the last full month of generative AI impressions by page. You cannot compare against a period you never recorded, and the report is new enough that most teams have no history yet.

Compare AI impressions against Web impressions per page

The ratio is more informative than the raw number. A page with a high share of AI impressions is being used as a source. A page with almost none is not, whatever its rankings say.

Do not build a click model on it

There is no click data, and inferring one from your blended Web CTR will produce a number that looks precise and is not. If someone hands you an AI traffic figure from Search Console, ask where the clicks came from.

Leave the opt-out toggle alone unless you have a specific reason

The control that removes you from AI surfaces is a real option, and for most businesses it is the wrong one. Because those clicks sit inside your Web totals, opting out removes visibility you are being credited for today, and you will not be able to isolate the loss well enough to measure what it cost you.

The limit worth naming

Search Console measures Google. That is all it can measure, and that is a reasonable thing for a Google product to do.

But the question most businesses are actually asking is not whether Google's AI Overviews cite them. It is whether they get recommended when someone asks an assistant for the best option in their city. That question spans ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and whatever comes next, and Search Console is blind to all of it by design.

There is a second limit that matters more, and it is easy to miss because the report looks like an answer. An impression means a link to your page appeared inside an AI response. It does not tell you what that response said. Whether you were the recommendation or a footnote at the end. Whether it named a competitor first. Whether it described what you actually do, or got it wrong.

Those are different questions from did my link show up, and they are usually the ones a business cares about.

So use the report for what it is good at. It is free, it is already on, and the page-level view will tell you something you did not know about which of your content Google's AI reaches for. Just do not read it as a picture of how AI talks about your brand, because it does not report on what was said, and it does not report on any engine but Google's.

How BizLoc8 covers what Search Console cannot

You do not have to choose between the two. Connect your Google Search Console account to BizLoc8, pick the property, and we pull your Search performance and the generative AI report straight through Google's API. The AI Overviews and AI Mode numbers land next to the rest of your data instead of in a separate tab you have to remember to open.

Then we answer the questions the report cannot.

What you getWhy it matters here
Your Search Console, connectedImpressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode pulled in automatically, page by page, sitting alongside your Google Business Profile and local data rather than in isolation.
What the answer actually saidSearch Console confirms a link appeared. We record the response itself: whether you were named, whether you were the recommendation or an afterthought, and which competitor got named ahead of you.
The engines Google will not report onChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, tracked on your own prompts. Google has no reason to tell you how you look inside someone else's assistant.
Per engine, per cityVisibility is not one score. A brand can be named consistently on one engine and invisible on another, and the answer changes by location, which matters if you run more than one.

We use the same engine on our own data. The AI Visibility Benchmark was built from 6,678 real AI answers across 215 businesses in 417 cities, pulled on 10 September 2026, and it is the reason we are confident about the gap this article describes.

Connect Search Console, then see what Google cannot show you

Link your property to BizLoc8 and your AI Overviews and AI Mode numbers land alongside the rest of your data. Then find out whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity actually recommend you, city by city, and what they say when they do.

Frequently asked questions

What does the Search Console generative AI report show?

Impressions only. Google's documentation states the report includes impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode on Google Search, broken down by page, country, device and date. There is a separate report for generative AI features in Discover. It does not include clicks, click-through rate, average position or query data.

Does the report include clicks from AI Overviews?

No, and this is the most misread part. The generative AI report itself shows no clicks. But Google does count clicks from AI features. Its documentation says sites appearing in AI features are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, reported on in the Performance report within the Web search type. Those clicks are already in your totals, blended in with ordinary blue-link clicks and not separable.

Are AI impressions counted on top of my normal Search totals?

No. Google's help documentation states the generative AI report includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report. The AI impressions are a view into traffic you were already being credited with, not a new channel added on top. Treating them as incremental will overstate your visibility.

Does this show my visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity?

No. Search Console reports only on Google surfaces, specifically AI Overviews and AI Mode on Google Search plus generative AI features in Discover. It has no visibility into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or any assistant outside Google. If those matter to you, they need separate measurement.

Should I use the toggle to block my content from AI features?

For most businesses, no. Google shipped a property-level control that removes your site from generative AI surfaces. Because AI Overview clicks are counted inside your existing Web totals rather than separately, opting out removes visibility you are currently being credited for, and you cannot isolate the loss afterwards to measure it. Treat it as a decision for sites with a specific legal or licensing reason, not a default.

Sources

Every claim above is drawn from the following. Where Google's own documentation and press coverage disagreed, we used Google.

This article was published on 10 September 2026 and reflects the reports as they stood on that date. Search Console features change, so check the help documentation before relying on any specific behaviour.