Generative AI in Search Console

#Where to find the Generative AI report in Search Console

The report lives under Performance, next to the Search results report, as a separate Generative AI entry. Google’s help page links it directly at search.google.com/search-console/performance/search-analytics/ai. The data breaks down by pages, countries, devices and dates, and the June 3 announcement lists hourly, daily, weekly and monthly granularity. The figures come from the Web search type of the Search performance report.

The report usually appears only when a site has enough impressions in generative AI features. If you do not see it, that is the first thing to suspect. The second is the generative AI control described further down: a site excluded from these features has nothing to report. Google’s help pages do not say how far back the history goes, so read the earliest date off your own chart instead of assuming one.

#AI Overviews vs AI Mode in the report

The report merges two surfaces that are worth keeping separate in your head. AI Overviews are the summaries generated above classic results, which the user sees without asking for anything beyond a normal query. It is a passive surface. AI Mode is a separate conversational search mode, where the user deliberately asks questions as a dialogue. That is active intent, and different behaviour. The Generative AI section counts both together, with no split between the two surfaces.

For anyone reading the report, that has a practical effect: you cannot tell today whether your impressions come from passive summaries or active conversations. Those are two different paths to your content, and likely two different audiences. Google does not separate them yet, so keep it in mind when you interpret the numbers.

#Why the AI report has no clicks or CTR

This is the part that matters most. The report shows impressions only. There are no:

• clicks,
• CTR,
• average position,
• queries.

So you learn which pages are cited in AI answers, but not whether anyone clicked through. For judging return on investment, that is not enough. The clicks themselves are not lost: Google’s help page on performance metrics counts a click on an external link in an AI Overview or in AI Mode as a click in the standard Performance report. What is missing is a way to separate those clicks from classic ones.

Google has not named a date for adding them here. The June 3 announcement says Google is working with site owners on which insights help most, including additional metrics over time. The post on Google’s The Keyword blog from the same day adds that Google is engaging with regulators such as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on these tools. For now you have half the answer.

#Are AI impressions new data in Search Console

It is easy to assume Google has revealed a new traffic source. It has not. These impressions were already counted in the standard Performance report. The Generative AI section is a filtered view of the same data, just better organised.

That has a practical consequence. If you see thousands of impressions in this section, do not add them to your existing traffic. They were already there.

#How an impression is counted

Google’s help page on clicks, impressions and position says standard impression rules apply to both AI Overviews and AI Mode. In general, a link counts as an impression when it is on the current page of results, scrolled into view or not. Inside an element that scrolls or expands on its own, the link typically has to be scrolled or expanded into view first. Three details are specific to generative features:

• Position. An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and every link inside it gets that same position. In AI Mode, a follow-up question counts as a new query, so the impressions and clicks in the new response belong to that query.
• Aggregation. In the Generative AI report, the chart aggregates by property, so two of your URLs in one answer count once there. Table rows grouped by page count per page. That is why the chart total and the sum of page rows can differ.
• Search Labs. Data from experiments in Search Labs is not included.

In the Discover report, Google counts one impression per result per session. Without that context it is easy to over-read or under-read your presence in AI.

#Pages, countries, devices and dates in the AI report

With so little data, it is worth squeezing what each dimension carries:

• Pages. The most important one. It shows which specific pages AI picks from your site as a source. That is a list of content that already earned a citation, and a hint about what to expand so more of it gets picked.
• Countries. Tells you which markets you appear in inside AI answers. If you run a multilingual site, it is a check on whether your AI visibility matches the distribution you actually care about.
• Devices. The desktop, tablet and mobile split shows where your AI presence is stronger. It is often different from your classic results. This dimension exists only in the Search report, not in Discover.
• Dates. Hourly granularity lets you see whether a publish or an update translated into a generative presence, and after how long.

None of these dimensions tells you whether anyone clicked. But put together, they map what AI takes from your site, where, and when. Two details from the help pages keep the map honest: pages are reported by canonical URL, after redirects, and dates are in Pacific Time.

#How to export Generative AI report data from Search Console

The report has its own Export button, which downloads both the chart and the table. Two limits from the help page matter. The table follows the limits of the Search performance report, including 1,000 rows. And values shown as ~ or - in the interface export as zeros, so a zero in the spreadsheet is not always a measured zero.

Going past the interface is harder than with the classic report. As of October 14, 2026, neither the Search Analytics API reference nor the bulk data export table reference lists a dimension or a field for generative AI features. Both still carry the totals that already include those impressions. The API also documents how to see which search appearance values exist on your property: run a query grouped by searchAppearance, then use the values it returns as a dimensionFilterGroups filter on a second call.

# 1. discover which appearance types exist on this property
curl -s -X POST \
  "https://www.googleapis.com/webmasters/v3/sites/sc-domain%3Aexample.com/searchAnalytics/query" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startDate":"2026-09-01","endDate":"2026-09-30","dimensions":["searchAppearance"],"dataState":"all"}' | jq '.rows[].keys'

Do not assume an appearance value before you have seen it in that first response. Google adds and renames these over time, and hard-coding a string you read in a blog post is how an export silently returns zero rows. Set rowLimit to at most 25000 (the documented maximum, the default is 1,000) and page with startRow. "dataState":"all" includes fresh, still-incomplete days; leave it out when you are building a stable monthly baseline. hourly_all together with the hour dimension returns an hourly breakdown.

The bulk export to BigQuery, configured in Settings, writes searchdata_site_impression (aggregated by property) and searchdata_url_impression (aggregated by URL) daily. That pair mirrors the property versus page aggregation of the Generative AI report. If Google adds a generative feature column later, a schema query is the quickest way to notice it:

SELECT column_name, data_type
FROM `your_project.searchconsole.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS`
WHERE table_name = 'searchdata_url_impression'
ORDER BY column_name;

Until such a column exists, the Export button is the only route to the generative numbers themselves, so export them every month and keep the files.

#How to verify a change in AI impressions

A moving line in this report has more boring explanations than interesting ones. Work through them in order.

Check the property type. A domain property aggregates every subdomain and both protocols. A URL-prefix property does not. If you compare a Generative AI number from one against a total from the other, the share you calculate is wrong before you start.

Check the date range against your rollout date. The report reached a subset of UK sites in June 2026 and all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026. A comparison that reaches back before your property had the report compares a real number against an absence, not a decline.

Check whether the last data is still filling in. The help page says the newest data is preliminary, drawn as a dotted line, and may change within a few hours. Read a trend from a range that ends a few days ago, not from the right edge.

Check the time zone. Search Console reports in Pacific Time, while your analytics tool almost certainly reports in your own. A daily comparison between the two will look off by a slice of a day, permanently, and no amount of rechecking the numbers will fix it.

Check the filters you left on. Country, device and page filters persist across views in the interface more often than people expect. If a number looks implausible, clear every filter and read the unfiltered total before you investigate anything else.

#Common mistakes reading the Generative AI report

Three slip-ups come up most often:

1. Adding AI impressions to your existing traffic. They were already counted. Doing that is double counting the same data.
2. Confusing an impression with a visit. An impression means the link was visible in the answer, not that anyone came to the page. Without clicks, you do not know how many people actually reached you.
3. Treating missing data as a decline. If you do not have the report yet, or your history only starts with the rollout to your property, that does not mean you were not cited before. It means Google did not report it before.

#Why AI Overview impressions dropped

Once you have a few weeks of history, the first alarming dip will arrive. These are the causes worth ruling out before you touch the content.

A URL change without a redirect. The pages dimension is keyed on the exact URL. Change a slug, and the old URL stops accumulating while the new one starts from zero. The property total barely moves, but any page-level dashboard you built shows a cliff. Before concluding anything, request the old path and confirm it still returns a 301 to the new one, wherever your redirects live: a server config, a host-level redirects file, or a plugin.

Canonical consolidation. Impressions are attributed to the canonical URL, not the one the user could have reached. If a canonical moved from a long slug to a short one, the reporting moved with it. That is a bookkeeping change, not a visibility change.

A query that never triggered a generative answer. Google’s AI features documentation says AI Overviews are shown only when its systems judge them additive to classic Search, and as such often do not trigger. It also notes that AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the links they show vary. The trigger rate for a given intent is not stable. A page can hold its classic position perfectly while its generative impressions go to zero, simply because the surface stopped appearing for those queries. Compare against the classic Performance numbers for the same page and date range before assuming the page lost anything.

Seasonality in the underlying demand. Generative impressions inherit the seasonality of the queries behind them. A B2B page will dip across holidays in its main market and recover, and the countries dimension will show you exactly which market caused it.

A snippet directive someone added. A nosnippet tag or a tightened max-snippet value shipped in an unrelated release will zero a page’s generative impressions while its classic position holds steady. The next section covers how to detect it.

A change to the generative AI control. If someone excluded the site, or the parent property it inherits from, generative impressions fall to zero within a few days. The section on the control below covers how to check it.

#How nosnippet and robots tags block AI Overviews

There is no separate switch for AI Overviews inside Google Search. Inclusion runs on the same snippet controls that have governed rich results for years, which means an ordinary robots meta tag can remove a page from generative answers while it still ranks.

• <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"> removes the text snippet, and with it the ability to be used in a generated answer.
• max-snippet:[n] caps the characters Google may use. A tight cap set years ago for a different reason still applies today.
• data-nosnippet on a div, span or section excludes just that block. Applied to the paragraph that answers the question, it removes exactly the part that would have been cited.
• Disallow in robots.txt blocks the fetch entirely, so nothing can be quoted regardless of the meta tags.

Google’s AI features documentation lists exactly these: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex limit what is shown from a page in Search, and robots.txt rules for Googlebot control crawling.

Google-Extended is a different lever. The same documentation describes it as the way to limit AI training and grounding in some of Google’s other systems, and the help page for the generative AI control adds that it limits training of the models used to generate responses in Search generative AI features. It is not an inclusion switch for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Blocking it does not remove you from the Generative AI report, and allowing it does not add you. Teams conflate the two constantly, then read the report looking for an effect that was never wired up.

Before you attribute a drop to an algorithm, run the mechanical check on the affected URL:

curl -sI https://example.com/en/your-page/ | grep -i x-robots-tag
curl -s https://example.com/en/your-page/ | grep -Eo '<meta[^>]+name="robots"[^>]*>'
curl -s https://example.com/en/your-page/ | grep -c 'data-nosnippet'

An X-Robots-Tag header set at the CDN or server level is the one people forget, because it is invisible in the page source and in the CMS. A CDN transform rule, a reverse proxy or a security plugin can all set it without touching the markup, which is why reading the response headers is the only reliable check.

If a preview control is in place and the page still shows up in AI features, Google’s troubleshooting steps are short. Confirm with the URL Inspection tool that the HTML Googlebot received actually contains the control, then allow time for a recrawl, which Google says can take anywhere from several days to several months. A recrawl request speeds up the first part only.

#How to exclude a site from AI Overviews in Search Console

On June 3, 2026, the same day as the report, Google began testing a site-level control, and on August 31, 2026 it rolled it out to all websites worldwide. According to the help page for the Search generative AI control, it sits under Settings > Search generative AI and covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover. There are three options:

• Include is the default. Your content can appear as links and help ground AI responses, and you receive impressions and traffic from these features.
• Exclude stops your links and content from appearing, and content crawled from your site is no longer used as input to generate responses or previews in these features. You receive no traffic or impressions from them.
• Inherit control from parent is the default for a property that has a parent. It follows the closest parent that set its own value, and otherwise the top-level domain property.

Google states that the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal elsewhere in Search, does not affect AI training (Google-Extended does), and does not remove a site from Search (noindex does). After a change, content is excluded within one to two days after the control goes live, and caching can delay some pages further.

For the report this matters twice. An excluded site sees its generative impressions go to zero, which is the expected result of the setting, not a ranking drop. And because a URL-prefix property inherits from its domain property by default, a change made by someone who owns the parent can reach your property’s report without anyone touching your own settings. Open the setting before investigating any other cause of a sudden zero.

#What the multimodal filter in the AI report shows

On September 24, 2026, Google added web multimodal search to both the Search results report and the Generative AI report. A search type filter now separates Web: text-based, queries typed into the search bar, from Web: multimodal, searches that start from an image: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search and the Chrome right-click “Search this image” feature. Google rolled it out globally from that day, and the data appears only if a site receives traffic from such searches.

For a site with product photos, recipes, diagrams or anything else people point a camera at, this is the first time generative impressions from image-led searches can be read on their own. Compare the two filters over the same range before assuming that your AI presence comes from typed queries. Google has not said whether the split reaches back before September 24, so check where the multimodal series begins in your own data before comparing months.

#How to calculate your AI share of impressions

Since all you have is impressions, get what you can from them:

1. Work out the AI share of your impressions. Compare the Generative AI section against the total in the Performance report for the Web search type, which is what the AI report is built on, over an identical date range and with an identical set of filters, or the ratio means nothing. Reported shares swing hard with market and query mix, so there is no industry benchmark worth borrowing here; the only figure that applies to you is the one you calculate. A worked example: 128,000 total impressions in a month against 21,000 in the Generative AI section puts your AI share at about 16 percent. Record that number, because its change over time says more than the value itself.
2. See which pages get cited. The pages dimension shows what AI picks from your site. That is a real signal for which content to expand and which to rewrite so it gets cited more often.
3. Do not optimise for clicks you cannot see yet. Until Google adds CTR, treat impressions as a presence signal, not a conversion one.

#How to track AI visibility month by month

The value of this report today is almost entirely in the archive you start keeping now. When clicks land, everyone will have the same fresh data and nobody will have history, unless they stored it.

Keep it small enough that it survives contact with a busy month. One row per property, per month, per page group, with five fields: date range, total impressions, generative impressions, generative share, and a free-text note for anything that happened (a migration, a redesign, a content pass). A CSV in the repo or a single BigQuery table is enough. A dashboard that nobody rebuilds after it breaks is not.

Two habits make the archive usable later:

Group pages before you store them. Page-level rows are noisy and turn over with every slug change. Grouping by section (blog, service pillars, city pages) keeps the series comparable across a year and survives the URL churn described above.

Log the interventions on the same timeline. A generative share that moved from one month to the next is uninterpretable without knowing what you shipped. One line per change, dated, in the same file. When CTR arrives, the question will be which content shape converts from an AI answer, and that is only answerable if you can line up changes against the series.

The first analysis worth running the day clicks appear is the gap between classic CTR and generative CTR for the same pages. A page that holds both is genuinely earning traffic from the surface. A page with high generative impressions and near-zero clicks is being summarised, and the value it produces is brand exposure, not sessions. Those two cases deserve opposite treatment, and today you cannot tell them apart.

#When will Search Console show AI clicks and CTR

Today the report answers one question: which pages are popular in generative features. Clicks and CTR will change that into a far more important one: whether AI presence turns into traffic, or just lets the model summarise your content and keep the user on its own surface. That distinction decides whether AI visibility is an acquisition channel or a cost.

Google has not given a date. The June 3 announcement promises additional metrics over time, and the Keyword post places that work alongside conversations with regulators such as the UK’s CMA. Treat the archive described in the previous section as the thing that will make the first CTR figures readable, whenever they arrive. Without that base, the first CTR data will be a number with no context.

The report is a measurement tool, not a strategy. If you want AI to cite your pages more often, that is content and structured-data work, which we cover in the GEO guide. If you want it implemented and measured on your site, that is our GEO/LLMO optimization service.