AI Visibility Lands in Search Console: What the Generative AI Report Shows — and Hides

On June 3, Google announced the single most-requested feature in the history of Search Console: a Generative AI performance report that finally surfaces how your pages perform inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. For nearly two years, AI features have been quietly eating into organic clicks while SEOs flew blind, with no native way to separate AI-driven visibility from the rest of Search. That blind spot is starting to close.

The first live properties are already showing the report, and the early read is mixed. Yes, this is a real step forward and the data many of us have been demanding. But the initial version answers a narrower question than the headlines suggest, and if you read it the wrong way you will draw conclusions the data simply cannot support. Here is what the report actually contains, what it deliberately leaves out, and how to put it to work across client accounts right now.

What Google Actually Shipped

The new report appears as a dedicated "Generative AI" section sitting underneath the standard Search results report in the Performance area, with separate views for Search and Discover. Click into your usual Search results report and you will see a prompt below the graph linking through to it. There is also a quick way in for the impatient: append /ai to your existing Performance report URL and the report loads directly, for both Search and Discover.

Data runs back to May 18, 2026, which is the earliest date you can assess. As with the Discover report, your property needs to clear a minimum impressions threshold for the AI tab to appear at all, so smaller sites and low-AI-volume Discover properties may not see it yet. The rollout is also geographically staggered: despite the official announcement not mentioning it, the first wave landed for UK properties only. If your sites sit outside the UK, expect a wait before the report populates.

Impressions Only — and Why That Matters

Here is the catch that gets lost in the excitement. In this first release the report shows impressions, and only impressions, broken down by page, country, device and date. The two metrics that actually tell you whether AI visibility is doing anything for the business — queries and clicks — are not there. You can see that you appeared inside an AI Overview or AI Mode answer. You cannot see what someone searched to trigger it, and you cannot see whether they clicked through.

That gap is bigger than it looks, because impressions have become an increasingly noisy signal in their own right. Without clicks, an impression inside an AI answer tells you that Google referenced or surfaced your page, not that it sent you a visitor or that the citation was even prominent. Treat the current numbers as a presence indicator, not a performance one. They confirm you are in the room; they say nothing about whether anyone heard you.

To put scale on it: one large UK site with access to the live report logged roughly 1.79 million AI impressions in the 18 days from May 18, around 120,000 a day. Over a single recent week, AI Overviews and AI Mode accounted for about 813,000 of 8.4 million total Search impressions — close to 10%. That site skews heavily branded, where AI Overviews appear less often, so for most commercial and informational sites the AI share will run higher. The direction of travel is clear even if the metric is blunt.

The Other Half of the Release: AI Controls

Shipping alongside the report is a new set of AI controls, found under Settings > AI controls > Search generative AI. These let a property owner choose to include or exclude their content from appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode, including whether the content can be used to ground AI responses at all. The default is include, which is what almost every commercial site should keep. Excluding means no clicks and no impressions from those features whatsoever — you remove yourself from the surface entirely rather than optimise within it.

The setting only took effect from June 17, and the practical advice is short: for the vast majority of advertisers and publishers, leave it alone. The exclude toggle is a blunt instrument aimed at a small set of publishers with specific licensing or content-protection concerns. For anyone whose goal is visibility, opting out of the fastest-growing surface in Search to protest the lack of click data would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Know the control exists, be able to explain it to a nervous client, and then move on.

How to Use It This Quarter

Even in its limited form, the report is worth wiring into your routine now. First, establish a baseline for every property that has the tab. Note the AI impression volume and, more importantly, AI impressions as a share of total Search impressions. That ratio is the number to watch over the coming months as AI Mode keeps expanding. Second, use the page-level breakdown to identify which of your URLs Google is actually pulling into AI answers. Those pages are your proven AI-citable assets — study what they have in common, because that pattern is your template for the rest of the site.

Third, set expectations with clients before they hear a half-version elsewhere. A short note explaining that Search Console now shows AI presence, that clicks and queries are coming but not here yet, and that you are tracking the trend, is the kind of proactive communication that builds trust. It is far better than fielding a panicked question after a client reads a LinkedIn post claiming the data means something it does not.

The natural progression is obvious, and Google has all but signalled it: once clicks and queries arrive, the AI data will likely fold into the main Search results report as a search appearance filter, exactly like every other rich result. When that happens, AI performance becomes a genuinely actionable layer of your reporting. Building the baseline now means you will have months of trend data ready the moment the metrics that matter show up.

For now, the report rewards a measured read: it is presence, not performance. Use it to understand where you stand in AI Search, not to declare victory.

If you want help interpreting your AI impression data and turning it into a content plan that earns more citations — reach out to NovaReach here. We audit organic visibility across traditional and AI-driven Search and can pinpoint which pages are already working in AI answers and which gaps to close next.