Google shipped the AI-visibility report every SEO has been asking for since AI Overviews launched. As of August 31, 2026, the Generative AI performance report in Search Console is live for every property worldwide, alongside a toggle that removes your site from AI Overviews and AI Mode entirely.
Both are useful. Both are also narrower than the headlines suggest, and reading the report the way you read your normal Performance report will lead you to the wrong conclusion about your own content. Here is what the data actually supports.
What Google actually shipped
Two things landed in Search Console, tested since June 3 and now global:
- A Generative AI performance report, under Performance, giving a dedicated view of your impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. A parallel report covers Discover.
- A Search generative AI control, under Settings, letting you exclude your property from those features.
The report gives you four dimensions: pages, countries, devices and dates. Impressions count when a link to your site appears inside an AI feature, assigned to the canonical URL, with the same 1,000-row and preliminary-data caveats as the standard report. Search Labs experiments are excluded.
That is the complete list. Read the next section before building anything on it.
The three gaps that change how you use it
There are no clicks. Impressions only: no clicks, no CTR, no position. You can see that a page surfaced inside an AI answer; you cannot see whether anyone came to you because of it. Everywhere else in Search Console, AI-feature traffic stays folded into your ordinary Web search numbers, so you cannot cleanly separate an AI-driven session from a blue-link one.
There are no queries. You get pages, not prompts. In classic search, the query dimension turns an impression into a content decision. Here, a page surfaced for reasons you cannot inspect, so the report tells you what is cited but never why.
An impression is not a visit. Seer Interactive's data puts zero-click rates around 83% with an AI Overview present and 93% in AI Mode. An impressions-only chart in that environment is a visibility signal, not a traffic signal. Present it to a client as demand and you will end up defending a number that never converted.
There is also a fresh reason to sanity-check what you are looking at. Google confirmed a logging error that under-counted impressions in the report for data from August 13 to 17, 2026, with a related error hitting Discover. The missing data was restored on August 21, and Google stated the issue affected logging only, not visibility. If you pulled a benchmark in that window, re-export it: a mid-August cliff in your chart is most likely that bug, not your content.
The opt-out toggle is more interesting than it looks
The control sits under Settings, in a section called Search generative AI, and offers a binary choice per property: include your links and content in generative AI features, or exclude them. Opting out means your content will not be linked inside those features and will not be used to ground AI responses. Google says opted-out sites receive no traffic or impressions from them, and that the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search.
That last clause is the news. Before this shipped, staying out of AI Overviews meant noindex, nosnippet or blocking Googlebot, and every one of those damaged your normal search appearance too. There was no way to decline the AI layer without paying for it in the blue links. Now there is.
It is still a domain-level decision. Page-level controls are not available yet: under the CMA conduct requirement that prompted this work, Google has until March 3, 2027 to implement them, with the substantive obligations taking force on December 3, 2026.
For almost every commercial site, stay in. AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode has passed one billion, so exclusion is a decision to be invisible in front of that audience. The toggle matters most to publishers whose content is the product, where being summarised without a visit is a direct loss. If you manage client properties, know it exists and know its default: a nervous client who has read one alarming thread now has a one-click way off a billion-user surface.
What to do with this in the next 30 days
Export a baseline now, and note the bug window. Pull the report per property and store it outside Search Console: the standard 16-month window applies, so unexported data ages out. Annotate August 13 to 17 so nobody reads that dip as a performance story later.
Report impressions as visibility, never as traffic. Give the metric its own line with an explicit definition: AI impressions for presence, organic clicks for outcome, and a written note that the two cannot be reconciled because Google does not publish AI clicks.
Find the citation gap. Cross-reference the pages dimension against your top organic URLs. Pages ranking well but never appearing in AI features are your worklist, and the cause is usually structural: an answer buried below 600 words of preamble, a claim with no source, a comparison with no table. The pages Google can lift a clean, attributable passage from get cited.
Fix formatting before commissioning new content. Ranking in the top 10 no longer guarantees citation: SE Ranking's data suggests only about 14% of AI Mode citations come from top-10 results. Direct answers near the top, specific numbers, real sources and a genuine FAQ section with schema do more for citation odds than another 1,000 words on the same topic.
Decide your opt-out position deliberately. Write down where each property stands and why. Not because most sites should leave, but because "we never decided" is a worse answer to a client than either yes or no.
Where this leaves programmatic SEO
If you publish at volume, the honest risk here is a new vanity metric. Impressions without clicks or queries can dress up a page library that generates presence and no pipeline.
The productive read is the opposite. This is the first Google-owned feedback loop on whether machine-generated pages are extractable enough to be cited, and it is page-level. Publish 200 pages, wait, and you can see which structures earn citations and which are invisible. That is a signal you can act on before scaling the next batch, and it points at what we built TrafficForge's QualityForge scoring around: a page that cannot pass a structural check is not a page an AI answer can quote. Score before you publish, then use the AI report to confirm the structure held up.
FAQ
Does the Generative AI performance report show clicks from AI Overviews?
No. It shows impressions only, across pages, countries, devices and dates. There is no click, CTR or position data, and Google has not committed to adding it. AI-feature traffic stays folded into your ordinary Web search metrics elsewhere in Search Console, so it cannot be isolated there either.
Why did my AI impressions drop in mid-August 2026?
Most likely a confirmed Google logging error that under-counted impressions in the report for data from August 13 to 17, 2026. Google restored the missing data on August 21 and said the issue affected logging only, not actual visibility in Search. Re-export any benchmark pulled in that window before comparing periods.
Should I opt my site out of AI Overviews and AI Mode?
For most commercial sites, no. AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode over one billion, so opting out removes you from that surface entirely, including any traffic it sends. The case is strongest for publishers whose content is the product being summarised. Google says the control is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search, so the decision no longer costs you standard visibility the way noindex or nosnippet did.
Is the opt-out control available per page?
Not yet. It applies at property level, across parent and child properties. Page-level controls are scheduled under the CMA conduct requirement for March 3, 2027, with the substantive obligations taking force on December 3, 2026.
Does ranking in the top 10 get me cited in AI answers?
Not reliably. Citation and ranking are separate selections, and research from SE Ranking indicates only around 14% of AI Mode citations come from top-10 results. Extractability matters more: a direct answer placed early, specific figures, named sources, and clean structured markup give a model something quotable and attributable.
How should agencies report AI visibility to clients?
Report it as a visibility metric on its own line, with the definition stated. Pair AI impressions with organic clicks and say plainly that the two cannot be reconciled, because Google does not publish AI clicks. Presenting impressions as traffic, in an environment where 83% to 93% of AI sessions end without a click, will not survive the first conversion question.