Search Console now tracks your visibility in Google's AI Mode

Since August 31, 2026, any website owner anywhere can open Search Console and see, for the first time with Google’s own data, whether their content shows up inside AI Overviews, AI Mode or the generative features in Discover. It’s the global rollout of what Google calls its “generative AI performance report,” after a test that started in June with a small group of UK sites. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona, the first thing we tell clients is what this report does not do — it saves a few premature decisions.

What the new report actually shows

The report breaks down impressions — not clicks, not queries — by page, country, device and date, with hourly, daily, weekly and monthly views, across three distinct Google surfaces: AI Overviews (the generated summaries on a regular search), AI Mode (the full conversational tab) and Discover’s generative cards. It lets you see which specific URLs have shown up inside an AI answer, something that until now could only be estimated indirectly by combining server logs with manual testing.

The data starts on May 18, 2026: there’s no backfill before that date, so any “before vs. after” comparison will have a gap that can’t be filled in. And it’s missing the piece that actually matters for deciding whether something is working: there are no clicks and no queries. A high impression count in AI Overviews can mean you’re cited prominently, or that you’re one of five sources nobody ever opens. Google itself makes this clear by keeping the report separate from the traditional “Search results” report, where clicks and average position still exist.

The opt-out almost no SME should flip on

The same August 31 rollout made the “Search generative AI” control global too — a toggle that excludes a site’s content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover without touching its ranking in regular search results. It makes sense for publishers whose business model depends on a user clicking through to see ads on their own page. For most businesses reading this, switching it on would mean giving up free visibility in the channel that’s growing fastest — there’s little reason to, unless there’s a very specific business case for staying hidden.

How to read the report without jumping to conclusions

Three things to keep in mind before looking at the number:

It doesn’t measure ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity

This report is strictly about Google. If your site doesn’t appear in AI Overviews but does get cited by ChatGPT (or the other way around), the report won’t reflect it — it only covers what Google surfaces inside its own ecosystem. To check the other assistants, the manual method we described in our guide on how to check if ChatGPT and Google already cite you still applies: ask them directly, and check which AI user-agents are crawling your server.

Zero impressions isn’t always a content problem

If the report shows zero or near-zero impressions, before rewriting anything it’s worth ruling out the basics: that robots.txt isn’t blocking Google-Extended, that key pages answer “what this business does and for whom” clearly in the first paragraph, and that a well-formed llms.txt exists. These are exactly the three points we cover in our GEO guide, and now there’s a report to check whether impressions move once you fix them.

An impression is not a sale

The real risk with this report is treating impressions as if they were traffic. A business might see its pages showing up 400 times a month in AI Overviews and, with no click data, have no way of knowing whether that generated a single visit. The value isn’t in the raw number — it’s in the trend per page: which content starts appearing after a technical fix, and in which countries, which is genuinely useful for companies with customers outside Spain.

What to actually do with it this week

If you manage your own website, the 30-minute exercise we’d recommend is: open Search Console, go to the new generative AI performance report, filter by your product or service pages, and check whether they show up. If they don’t, go through the technical checklist above before touching a single word of copy. If they do show up but with low numbers, cross-reference against the real traffic for those same pages in the regular Search report, so you don’t overrate the channel.

This is exactly the kind of audit we run when a company asks us to build a website designed for SEO and AI: measure first with real data — now including Google’s own — before deciding what to change. It’s part of our SEO & AI website service, starting at €3,500 with delivery in 4-6 weeks. If you want to know what this report already says about your site, get in touch: the first consultation is free.