Google Search Console can finally show you whether you’re appearing in AI search

For two years now, most of us have been working with a frustrating blind spot. AI Overviews and AI Mode have been reshaping how people search, your content has very likely been appearing inside those features, and yet there was no way to see it in Search Console. The data was being counted, but it sat buried inside your overall performance numbers with no way to pull it apart.

On 3 June 2026, Google changed that. There will soon be dedicated Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, and for those of you whose accounts we manage, this gives us a new layer of data to work with. Here is what has actually landed, what it tells us about your sites specifically, and what we would and would not read into it at this stage.

What’s new in your Search Console

Google has added dedicated Generative AI performance reports, which sit within the Performance section as their own tab, separate from the standard search data we usually review. There are two views: one for generative AI features within Search, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a separate one for generative AI features within Discover.

The key thing is that this data is now isolated. Previously it was folded into your overall performance report with no way to tell what was a standard blue-link impression and what came from an AI feature. Now we can look at AI visibility on its own.

The metrics you’ll see

The reports currently give us five dimensions of data:

• Impressions, showing how often your URLs appeared inside generative AI features
• Pages, showing which specific URLs are surfacing in AI results
• Countries, giving a geographic breakdown of your visibility
• Devices, splitting desktop and mobile
• Dates, so we can track how this trends over time

For most of your sites, the pages and impressions breakdown is the immediately useful part. It tells us which of your content Google is actually choosing to pull into AI responses, which is something we have been inferring rather than measuring up to now.

What it doesn’t show, and why that matters for how we read it

We want to be straight with you about the limitation here, because it is significant. There is no click data in these reports. No clicks, no click-through rate, no average position and no query data. At launch, the reports tell us how visible your content is inside AI search, not how much traffic that visibility is sending you.

That is an important distinction when we sit down to review performance. We can now answer “is your content appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode?” with confidence. We still cannot answer “how much of your traffic is coming from those appearances?” Those are two genuinely different questions, and the second is usually the one that matters most to your bottom line. Google has said more metrics will be added over time, so we expect this picture to improve, but we would rather you knew the gap exists now than discovered it when we are reviewing the numbers.

Why some of you can see it and others can’t yet

If you have looked and the Generative AI tab is not there, you have not done anything wrong. Google is rolling this out in phases, starting with a subset of site owners in the UK before expanding globally.

The UK-first approach is deliberate. The Competition and Markets Authority has been requiring Google to give publishers more transparency and control over how their content is used in AI features, which is part of why this is appearing here first. When it does arrive in your account, you will find it under Performance, then Search results, within the dedicated Generative AI tab.

The opt-out toggle, and my recommendation

Alongside the reports, Google has launched a toggle that lets you exclude your content from appearing in generative AI features. We are flagging this proactively because we expect some of you will spot it and wonder whether you should use it.

For almost all of you, our advice is don’t. Opting out means forfeiting the AI visibility we are now, finally, able to measure. Google has confirmed that opting out does not improve your standard organic rankings, so you would be giving up AI impressions and getting nothing in return. If you have a specific concern about particular content being used this way, talk to us first and we can look at whether it applies to your situation, but as a blanket setting it is not something we would switch on.

What we’re doing with this for your accounts

The reassuring part is that this launch confirms the approach we have already been taking. The work we have been doing on topical authority, well-structured content and demonstrating genuine expertise is exactly what positions your sites to appear in AI features. The signals Google uses to feature pages in AI Overviews are not a separate discipline from the ones that drive your organic rankings.

What changes is that I can now move from inference to measurement. Over the coming weeks we will start building a baseline of your AI visibility, identifying which content types and topics are pulling in impressions, and folding that into your regular performance reviews. Where it is useful, it will also inform where we focus editorial effort next. For those of you on retainer, this will simply become part of the reporting you already receive from us, with no action needed on your end.

If you want to talk through what your specific AI visibility data is telling us, or you would like us to walk you through the new reports on your own account, just drop us a line and we will set up a time.

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