Search Console's Generative AI Report: What It Counts

What the report counts: Search Console's generative AI performance report shows impressions: how many times links to your site were shown to a user in AI Overviews or AI Mode. You can group them by page, country, date or device (Search Console Help, Generative AI performance report). The help page describes no click, query or position data. So it tells you that you were shown. It describes no view of the answer itself.

What the report is

Google announced it on 3 June 2026 and first gave it to a subset of websites (Google Search Central Blog, 3 June 2026). A note on that post and on the help page now says: "As of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide."

It sits beside the normal Performance report in Search Console. There is one for Search and a separate one for Discover. This page is about the Search one.

What it counts

One thing: impressions. Google defines them as "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search" (Search Console Help, Generative AI performance report).

Two features are included today:

AI Overviews
AI Mode

Google says it expects to update that list over time. Experiments in Search Labs are left out.

You can group the impressions four ways:

Pages. The final URL the AI feature linked to, after any redirects. Most data is assigned to the page's canonical URL.
Countries. Where the search came from.
Dates. By day, week or month. All dates are in Pacific Time.
Devices. Desktop, tablet or mobile.

There is also a search type filter. "Web: text-based" covers typed searches. "Web: multimodal" covers searches made with an image, such as Google Lens or Circle to Search.

What it leaves out

This list is our reading of the help page as it stood on 12 November 2026. Google may add to the report.

Clicks. The help page describes impressions only. Search Engine Journal reported that the report had no click data when it rolled out worldwide (Search Engine Journal, 31 August 2026).
Queries. The four groupings are pages, countries, dates and devices. The help page lists no query grouping, so it describes no way to see which searches you appeared for.
The answer. The help page describes no view of what the AI wrote, whether it named your brand, or who else it linked to.
Position. The help page describes no position measure for a link inside an answer.
A split between the two features. The help page describes no AI Overviews versus AI Mode breakdown. It lists them together as what is included.

An impression here means a link to your site was shown. It does not mean your brand was recommended. In our own research those two things come apart: pages were cited in an answer's sources while the brand went unnamed (SearchIntel Study 02).

How the totals are added up

The chart and the table do not count the same way, and Google says so (Search Console Help, Generative AI performance report).

The chart is aggregated by property, or by URL if you add a URL filter. If two results from your site appear in one AI feature, "they count as a single impression in the chart total".
The table, when grouped by page, is aggregated by page. On our reading, each of those two pages is then counted separately.

Google says the chart and table totals can differ, usually because of this. Ours differ, though we have not tested the cause. For 10 August to 9 November 2026 the card on our own site showed 6.66 thousand impressions, and the 42 page rows added up to 6,746. One post accounted for 3,003 of them.

Two more limits. The table is capped at 1,000 rows, like the normal Performance report. And the newest data can be preliminary. Google marks it with a dotted line and says it may still change.

Why you might not see the report

Google gives two likely reasons (Search Console Help, Generative AI performance report):

Too few impressions. "This usually happens when your site hasn't received enough impressions in generative AI features on Google Search."
The site may have been excluded. Search Console has a Search generative AI control under Settings. A property can be set to include or exclude its links and content from these features. Include is the default, and a property with a parent follows the parent's choice by default (Search Console Help, Search generative AI control).

Check that control before you conclude anything from an empty report. Google says an excluded site "won't receive any traffic or impressions from these features". It also says the control is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search, and that it does not affect AI training, which is handled by Google-Extended.

How we read ours

This is our practice. It is not Google's guidance.

Start on the Pages tab. It shows which pages Google's AI features link to. On our site one post has about 45% of the impressions in the Pages table. That told us which page to look after first.
Compare with the normal Performance report. Google says the generative AI report "includes data from the Web search type" in the Performance report. So these impressions are already inside your Web totals. Do not add the two together.
Read weeks, not days. Daily figures on a small site jump around. We compare the same weekdays.
Do not assign a cause from the chart. When our own line fell, the report could not tell us why. We recorded the fall and left the cause open.
Check the answers separately. The report counts appearances, not what was said. We search the questions that matter and record who is named. See how to appear in Google AI Overviews for that method.

What it does not cover

The report is about Google Search. It says nothing about ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity. OpenAI's Business Hub, in beta, provides aggregated ChatGPT mentions and website clicks for claimed businesses once activity thresholds are met (OpenAI, 10 November 2026). To see the answers on any of them, ask the questions and read what comes back. Our free AI brand checker runs up to five of your questions on five platforms, Google AI Mode among them.

Frequently asked questions

Where is the generative AI report in Search Console?

It is a performance report in Search Console, alongside the normal Search results report. If it is missing, Google says the usual reason is too few impressions in generative AI features, or that the site has been excluded through the Search generative AI control.

Does the generative AI report show clicks?

Google's help page describes impressions only. Search Engine Journal reported on 31 August 2026 that the report had no click data at that point.

Does it show which queries triggered an AI Overview?

No query grouping is listed. The report groups impressions by page, country, date or device.

Are AI Overviews impressions also in the normal Performance report?

Yes. Google says the generative AI report includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report. The same impressions sit inside your Web totals.

Does an impression mean my brand was recommended?

No. It means a link to your site was shown in an AI feature. The help page describes no view of the answer or the names in it.