Last updated August 2026.
The news: wider access, still no clicks
On Aug. 15, 2026, Search Engine Land reported that Google keeps widening access to the Generative AI Performance report inside Search Console, the dashboard built to show how your site performs inside Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s own Search Central Blog first announced the report on June 3, 2026. More than two months later, access is still rolling out property by property, and the report still ships with no click data at all.
That gap matters more than it sounds. This report is currently the only first-party data Google gives any site owner about its AI surfaces. For a GEO or AEO team asking what the measurement standard even is, this is the closest thing to an official answer Google has published, even though the report cannot settle the ROI question by itself.
This piece walks the report field by field, lists exactly what it withholds, and gives you a concrete method for closing that gap with a third-party tracker.
What the report actually shows, field by field
The report groups your data across four dimensions. Here is what each one covers, according to Google’s own Search Console Help documentation.
| Field | What it groups by | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | How often a link to your site appeared inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, or generative Discover features | The only metric in the report. No click or CTR sits next to it. |
| Pages | The final canonical URL a generative AI feature linked to, after redirects | Uses the same canonicalization logic as your standard Performance report. |
| Countries | The country where the search happened | No city or region breakdown is available. |
| Devices | Desktop, tablet, or mobile | Covers Search results only, not the Discover version of the report. |
| Dates | Hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly | All timestamps use Pacific Time. |
A few details are easy to miss on first read.
There is no queries dimension. Your standard Performance report lets you filter and group by search query. This one does not. You see which pages, countries, and devices picked up impressions, but never which prompt triggered them.
The usual limits still apply. The same 1,000-row cap carries over from the standard Performance report, the newest days show as preliminary on the chart, and chart totals (aggregated by property) can disagree slightly with table totals (aggregated by page or by property depending on the dimension you pick). Google documents all three as expected behavior, not bugs.
Coverage is still narrow. Search Console excludes impressions from active Search Labs experiments, so an opt-in AI Mode test will not show up here. As of this writing the report covers two capabilities, AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus a separate version for generative Discover features. Google says it expects to add more over time.
The toggle Google buried in Settings
The second half of this rollout is a control, not a report. It is called the Search generative AI control, and you find it under Settings, then Search generative AI, inside Search Console.
The control offers three choices:
- Include your site’s links and content. This is the default for every property. Your content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover features, and you can receive impressions from them.
- Exclude your site’s links and content. Your site stops being eligible to appear in those features at all, including as a grounding source for someone else’s AI answer. You will not receive any impressions from them once the exclusion takes effect, generally within a few days.
- Inherit control from a parent property. Your property follows whatever setting its closest parent property uses, and changes there apply automatically unless you configure your own value.
Three distinctions matter here, because they get confused often. Excluding your site is not noindex: noindex removes you from Search entirely, while this control only touches the generative AI features above and leaves your normal organic presence untouched. It is not Google-Extended either: that setting limits whether your content trains future models, while this control only governs whether existing content can be shown or cited in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover today. And Google states directly that the control is not a ranking signal; excluding your site does not change your visibility anywhere else on the results page.
What it shows vs. what it hides
| What it shows | What it hides |
|---|---|
| Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode | Clicks or click-through rate |
| Which pages appear, by canonical URL | Where your citation sits inside the generated answer |
| Country-level breakdown | Query-level or prompt-level breakdown |
| Device breakdown (desktop, tablet, mobile) | Which competitor sources appeared in the same answer |
| Hourly-through-monthly impression trend | Sentiment or how your brand was framed in the generated text |
| A dedicated Discover generative AI view | Data from active Search Labs experiments |
The pattern across that right column is consistent. Google will tell you that you showed up. It will not tell you what happened next, and it will not tell you how you were described.
Why impressions alone cannot prove the traffic argument
An impression is not a result. It tells you Google’s system judged your page relevant enough to draw from, not that a user read your brand name, clicked through, or even scrolled past the answer.
Pair that with what the wider AEO measurement picture already shows: BrightEdge’s February 2026 tracking data found AI Overviews appearing on roughly 48% of monitored queries, up from about 31% a year earlier, and Seer Interactive’s 2026 study of 53 brands found pages cited inside an AI Overview earn roughly 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited pages on the same result page. Neither number comes from Search Console. Both come from third-party trackers running live queries and comparing outcomes.
That is the actual gap this report leaves open. You can watch your impressions rise in Search Console and still have no idea whether that translated into a citation a user actually saw, or into any click at all.
How to triangulate: pairing Search Console impressions with a citation tracker
Use this sequence to build a measurement stack that covers what Search Console leaves out.
- Export your baseline from Search Console. Pull impressions by page, country, and device from the Generative AI Performance report on a weekly cadence, and store it somewhere you can trend over time.
- Run the same target queries through a third-party AIO tracker. Semrush and SE Visible plug AI Overview and AI Mode tracking into the rank-tracking workflow your team already runs, so citation data sits next to keyword position instead of in a separate silo.
- Match impression spikes to citation events. When a page’s impressions jump in Search Console, check whether your tracker recorded a new or stronger citation for the matching query on that date. A spike with no matching citation usually means you are being drawn on as a grounding source without being named.
- Validate your query list against a real-prompt corpus. Ahrefs Brand Radar’s search-backed prompt data confirms whether the queries you track reflect what people actually ask, not just the terms your team guessed at.
- Close the gaps you find. A page with impressions but no citation is a content and schema problem, not a monitoring problem. Temso is one credible all-in-one option for this step: it tracks citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, and ships the content, schema, and citation fixes to close a gap in the same platform, from $89 per month with unlimited projects, users, and recommendations on every plan.
- Re-run the comparison monthly. Log the delta between your Search Console impression trend and your tracker’s citation rate so you can see whether the gap is closing.
Search Console covers only the impression side, and only for Google’s own AI surfaces. Everything else in that sequence runs through a third-party tracker: see the full AEO tool ranking for a side-by-side of the options, and the methodology page for how this site verifies vendor claims.
Changelog
- Aug. 31, 2026: Confirmed the rollout is still widening per Search Engine Land’s Aug. 15, 2026, report; verified the report still ships with no click data and no queries dimension, and no field changes since launch.
- June 3, 2026: Google’s Search Central Blog announced the Generative AI Performance report, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions by page, country, device, and date, alongside the Search generative AI control.
This page is maintained as the canonical explainer of the report and will be updated at each further rollout stage or field change. See the glossary for definitions of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and related measurement terms.
Start closing the gap this week
Pull your Generative AI Performance report from Search Console, then read how to measure AI answer citations for the full step-by-step on building the third-party half of this measurement stack. If Google’s own rank tracker blind spot is new to you, the companion explainers on why standard rank trackers miss the AIO box and what AIO citation tracking requires cover the mechanics in more depth.