On June 3, 2026, Google gave site owners something they’d been asking for since AI Overviews launched: a way to see how their pages show up inside Google’s AI-generated answers. The new Search Generative AI performance report lives inside Search Console’s Performance section, and for the first time, it separates AI visibility from the rest of your Search data instead of folding it into one blended number.
That’s a real, useful shift for anyone who runs a website. But the report itself isn’t the story. What it confirms is narrow: your pages generated impressions inside Google’s AI features. It doesn’t tell you who saw them, what they took away, or whether they went on to consider your business. What it makes possible is a different question worth asking anyway: what happens when someone encounters your business through an AI-generated summary before they ever visit your site?
What the new Search Generative AI performance report shows
The report gives you impression data for your site’s links inside generative AI features, broken down by page, country, device, and date, with granularity down to the hour. You can see how often links to your site appeared inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features inside Discover, and which specific pages Google pulled in to build those answers.
What it doesn’t show, at least for now: clicks, click-through rate, or the actual queries that triggered your appearance. Google has said it’s continuing to work with website owners to understand what additional metrics would be most helpful, with more expected over time, but as of this writing, you can confirm you showed up. You can’t yet see whether that translated into a visit.
It’s worth being clear about what’s new here and what isn’t. Google has confirmed that AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic was already counted inside your overall Performance report, under the “Web” search type, all along. The June update didn’t add new data to Search Console. It gave that existing data its own dedicated view, so you can look at it on its own instead of guessing which slice of your Web performance came from an AI summary.
Alongside the report, Google introduced a related control: a property-level toggle that lets a site opt out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover AI entirely. Google has said this setting won’t be used as a ranking signal for regular Search results, so a site that opts out keeps its normal search visibility. It simply stops appearing inside the AI-generated answers, and stops receiving any traffic or impressions from them. Google’s own announcement describes the rollout as reaching “a subset of websites,” without naming a region; early trade reporting from Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable, both citing Google directly, has described that initial subset as UK-based site owners, ahead of a wider release.
If your rollout hasn’t reached you yet, that’s expected. It’s worth checking Search Console periodically rather than assuming you’re missing something on your end.
Where to find it in Search Console
If your property has access, the report sits inside the Performance section, the same area where you already check your regular Search results data. Open Search Console, select Performance from the left-hand navigation, and look for a new “Generative AI” entry appearing as its own item, or as an expandable panel underneath the standard “Search results” report. Google has also been surfacing a direct link to the new report from within the Search results view itself, so if you land on your usual Performance graph and see a prompt pointing you toward AI data, that’s the same report.
Inside it, you’ll find an impressions chart you can filter by page, country, device, and date.
If you don’t see it yet, Google lists three likely reasons. Your property may simply have missed the staged rollout so far, which is still expanding property by property. Your site’s impressions inside generative AI features may still fall short of the threshold needed to populate a report. Or your property may have been set to exclude itself from Search generative AI features, whether deliberately through the opt-out control or through an inherited setting from a parent property.
There’s no submission form or verification step to speed this along. The most useful habit in the meantime is to check back under Performance every so often, since Google has said access will keep widening as testing continues.
Why this isn’t only an SEO story
Here’s what’s new, according to Google’s own documentation for site owners: AI Overviews and AI Mode work by issuing several related searches behind the scenes, a technique Google calls query fan-out, gathering supporting pages across each subtopic before writing a single response. Google has also said that when people do click from a page that includes AI Overviews, that click tends to be a higher-quality one, meaning the visitor spends more time on the site once they arrive.
Google has also reported that overall organic click volume held relatively stable in aggregate, even as AI features expanded, with click quality trending up. That’s Google’s own data, and it doesn’t settle the question for any single site in 2026, but it does suggest a real possibility worth taking seriously: the bottleneck may be moving rather than disappearing. Fewer people may see your site as their very first stop, but the ones who do click through have already read a summary and chosen to go further anyway.
That’s a different kind of visitor than the one your website was built for. The old assumption was that someone lands on your homepage cold, with no context. Increasingly, they land with a rough idea of who you are and what you do, formed by a paragraph they didn’t write and you didn’t control.
The question this raises
If someone forms an early impression of your business from an AI-generated answer, what job is left for your website to do?
Four things, mainly.
- Prove what the summary only claimed.
- Go deeper than a paragraph ever could.
- Explain the reasoning a compressed answer leaves out.
- And close the loop, since no AI-generated response is going to book the consultation or fill out the contact form for you.
None of that is new. It’s the same work a good website has always done for a skeptical visitor. What’s changed is the moment it happens. That work used to start the second someone landed on your homepage from a search results page. Now it often starts the second someone lands having already read a summary of what you do, and is deciding whether the summary was accurate enough to trust the rest of the site.
What to check if your Search Console rollout has arrived
If you have access to the report, look at which pages show up most often inside AI features, and whether those are the pages you’d choose to represent your business. A page that ranks well in AI Overviews for the wrong reason, thin, generic, easy for a model to summarize, isn’t doing you a favor. It’s putting your least persuasive content in front of the people forming their first impression of you.
Pair that with Google Analytics, but keep the two straight. Search Console’s generative AI report measures impressions inside Google’s own AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google Analytics now has a separate AI Assistant channel that tracks referral traffic arriving from recognized AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, which is a different surface entirely. Search Console tells you where you showed up inside Google’s Search results. Analytics, used correctly, tells you what happened once someone from an AI surface landed on your site. You need both to get a full picture, but they’re answering different questions.
What to do either way
Whether or when the report reaches your property, a few habits hold up regardless. Keep your organization’s identity and credentials clearly and consistently stated across the site, since that’s the material an AI system draws on when it decides how to describe you. Put direct, specific answers near the top of the pages that matter most, rather than making a reader or a model dig for them. Keep the facts on your site consistent with each other, page to page, since an AI system trying to summarize your business will notice if your “About” page and your homepage tell slightly different stories.
None of this is about tricking a model into quoting you. Google has been direct that there’s no special markup or file needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that the same foundational SEO practices that always mattered still do. What’s changed is the stakes of getting the fundamentals right. A thin or inconsistent page used to cost you a ranking. Now it can cost you a first impression, delivered by an algorithm speaking on your behalf.
