Google Search Console Adds Generative AI Performance Reports and an AI Opt-Out Control

For the past two years, business owners have asked a question that Google Search Console could not answer cleanly: how often does my website show up inside Google's AI answers? Google now has a dedicated report for it. According to the Search Console help page for the Generative AI performance report, the reports had been rolled out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026.

Google first announced the reports on June 3, 2026, in a Search Central blog post titled Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, describing dedicated reports for Search and for Discover. Alongside them, Search Console now has a setting that lets a site owner exclude a site from these AI features altogether.

Both matter to anyone who relies on organic search, and both are easy to misread. This article explains what the reports contain, what they leave out, and how to treat the opt-out. If you work with an agency on SEO services, it should also help you ask better questions about the numbers you are shown.

What Google has released

There are three separate pieces, all documented in Search Console Help and all available now:

• A Generative AI performance report for Search, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode.
• A Generative AI performance report for Discover, covering generative AI features in Google Discover.
• A Search generative AI control, found under Settings, which decides whether a site can appear in those features.

The help pages for the reports and for the control each carry the same statement of availability: as of August 31, 2026, rolled out to all websites worldwide. That applies to US and UK properties alike.

What the Search report shows

The report is built around one metric. Google's help page defines impressions as how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search, and says the report includes impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Features that are still Search Labs experiments are not counted.

You can break the impressions down by page, country, device and date, with dates available by day, week or month. Google says the page shown is the final URL that the AI feature linked to. The layout will be familiar to anyone who has used the standard Performance report: a chart of impressions over time above a table grouped by the dimension you choose, with an export option.

Google suggests three uses on the help page: seeing how impressions from generative AI features change over time, finding which pages get the most or fewest of those impressions, and understanding where they come from by device or country.

Text and multimodal searches

The report has a search type filter with two options. One is for text-based web searches. The other, labeled multimodal, covers searches that start from an image, with the help page giving Google Lens and Circle to Search as examples. On September 24, 2026, Google published a further Search Central post announcing web multimodal Search performance reporting in Search Console. We could confirm the title and date of that post but could not read its full text, so we describe only what the help page states.

What the report does not tell you

This is where expectations need managing. The help page for the Search report describes impressions and does not describe click, click-through rate or position data for AI features. The dimensions it lists are pages, countries, devices and dates; search queries are not among them. So, on Google's own description, the report tells you which of your pages were linked in AI answers and how often, but not which questions triggered them or how many people clicked through.

For clicks, the older guidance still appears to apply. Google's documentation on AI features and your website says that sites appearing in AI features are reported in the main Performance report within the Web search type. Clicks from AI features are therefore part of your overall web totals, not a separate line.

There are practical limits too. The table follows the usual Search Console row limits, the most recent data is marked as preliminary and can change, and Google lists reasons a property may show no data, including too few impressions in AI features or the site having been excluded from them.

The new control: excluding a site from AI features

The Search generative AI control sits under Settings in Search Console. Google's help page gives three choices: include the site, which is the default; exclude it; or inherit the setting from a parent property. The page says that if you exclude your site, links to it and its content will not appear in Search generative AI features.

Google is specific about the boundaries. It says the control only affects whether content can appear in those features and is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of Search. It also says the control does not affect AI training, and points to Google-Extended for limiting that. Changes are not instant: the page says exclusion generally takes a few days, and that some content can take longer because of caching.

What it means for your business

The useful change is that visibility in AI answers is now something you can measure with first-party data. Before this, businesses relied on third-party trackers that sample AI results from outside. Google's own guide to optimizing for generative AI features tells site owners to use this report to measure visibility, and states that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.

The limitation is just as important. An impression in an AI answer is a link shown, not a visit. A page can gain AI impressions while its clicks stay flat or fall. Treat the report as a measure of presence, and judge commercial results from clicks in the standard Performance report and from leads or sales in your own analytics.

On the control, most businesses that want to be found will leave the default in place. Excluding a site removes its links from AI Overviews and AI Mode, which are placements competitors may continue to occupy. The setting is more likely to suit publishers and others whose business depends on people reading the content on their own pages. That is a commercial judgment for each business, and Google's documentation does not recommend one choice over the other.

What to do next

Open Search Console and look for the Generative AI performance report under Performance. If your site is set up as several properties, such as a domain property plus separate URL-prefix properties for a blog or shop, check each one.

Record a baseline now. Note total AI impressions for the last full month and the ten pages with the most impressions. Then set those pages beside their clicks in the standard Performance report. Pages with high AI impressions and falling clicks are the ones worth reviewing: check that each gives a visitor a reason to click through, such as detail, pricing guidance, tools or examples that a short summary cannot carry.

Check who has access to Search Console as well. The generative AI control is a site-wide switch with real consequences, so confirm that only people who should be able to change settings can do so, and that the control is set as you intend on every property.

Finally, ask whoever reports on your SEO to add AI impressions as a separate line, clearly labeled as impressions, and not to merge it with traffic figures.

Conclusion

Google announced Generative AI performance reports for Search Console on June 3, 2026, and its help pages say they were available to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026, together with a control for excluding a site from AI features. The reports show how often and where your pages are linked in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover. Based on Google's documentation they do not show the queries behind those impressions, and they are not a traffic report.

Used with that in mind, they give a business its first reliable view of AI visibility in Google Search. If the data points to pages that need restructuring, faster loading or better content templates, Entrant Technologies builds and maintains websites and web applications, and you are welcome to contact us to talk it through.