Google Search Console now has a Generative AI performance report: launched 3 June 2026: that shows how often your pages appeared inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is the first time Google has officially confirmed, in your own first-party data, that it surfaces your content in AI answers. But it reports impressions only: no clicks, no queries, no position, and no way to tell whether you were cited or merely shown. It answers "did I appear?" and almost nothing else.
This is part of the measuring AI visibility series. It is the Google-side counterpart to what Bing Webmaster Tools' AI data tells you. A free first-party signal that is real evidence and a narrow slice at the same time.
What does the Generative AI performance report include?
A single metric. Impressions. Sliced by four dimensions. According to Google's June 2026 announcement and the Search Console Help documentation, the report covers generative AI features in Search (AI Overviews and AI Mode), with a separate view for generative AI features in Discover; Search Labs experiments are excluded.
| Dimension | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Impressions | How often links to your site were shown inside a generative AI feature |
| Pages | Which URLs appeared, grouped to the canonical URL |
| Countries | Where the search originated |
| Devices | Desktop, tablet, or mobile (Search results only) |
| Dates | Performance over time. Hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly granularity |
The data is not a separate silo: Google notes these AI impressions are part of your overall Search performance totals, now broken out into their own view. Treat the newest days, shown as a dotted line, as preliminary. They can change within hours.
What does the report deliberately leave out?
The omissions are bigger than the inclusions, and naming them is how you read the report honestly. As of its June 2026 launch, the report does not show:
- Clicks or CTR: so you cannot calculate the value of an AI impression or compare it to your traditional-search click-through rate.
- The queries that triggered the impression. You see that a page appeared, not the question that surfaced it.
- Position or a visibility trend: there is no "average position" equivalent for AI features.
- Cited versus surfaced: an impression does not tell you whether the answer leaned on your page as a source or merely displayed it among links.
The report confirms you showed up. It can't tell you which question surfaced you, whether anyone clicked, or whether you were the source the answer trusted, and those are the questions that decide strategy.
This is the same critique practitioners raised within days of launch: impressions confirm presence but not context. A page with 100,000 AI impressions and no query, click, or citation breakdown tells you something is working without telling you what to do more of.
How should you use it today?
Use it for what it is good at. Confirming reach and spotting movement, and pair it with the data it lacks. A practical workflow:
- Confirm coverage. Check which pages earn AI-feature impressions at all. A page you expected to surface that shows zero impressions is a reachability or extractability problem to chase down.
- Watch trend, not snapshots. AI impressions are noisy day to day; use the date view to read direction over weeks, the way you would read any visibility case study. Looking for sustained change, not a single spike.
- Cross-reference pages with your own AI-answer checks. Because the report can't say whether you were cited, take the pages that earn impressions and verify in the actual engines whether you are quoted, linked, or recommended versus merely cited.
- Layer it into the stack. This is one engine's impression feed. Fold it into the broader five-metric reporting stack alongside Bing's citation data and cross-engine share of voice so no single source defines your view.
Why is an impressions-only report still worth wiring in?
Because a free, official, first-party signal beats inference. Even a narrow one. Before this report, "are we in AI Overviews?" was answered by third-party trackers and spot checks. Now Google itself confirms it, which is the kind of corroborated, first-party evidence worth anchoring a baseline on. The limits are the point, not a reason to ignore it: it tells you the door is open, and you still have to walk through the rest of the measurement yourself.
The honest read is that Google's report answers "did we appear in AI search?" and is silent on "which questions, how often clicked, and were we the trusted source?". The cross-engine, answer-level questions that decide where to invest. Closing that gap, by turning per-engine impression feeds into one answer-level scoreboard across every AI surface, is exactly what Buffy Intel is built to do. Questions: [email protected].