The Search Console AI Report: Half a Report, Worth Reading

SEOs spent two years asking Google for AI visibility data. On 3 June 2026 it arrived, and the reaction split immediately between people calling it a breakthrough and people calling it useless.

Both are overstating it. The Search Console AI performance report is half a report. Half a report about something you previously could not see at all is still a substantial upgrade, provided you understand precisely which half is missing before you build anything on it.

There is also a settings toggle shipped alongside it that can remove your site from AI answers entirely, and that deserves more attention than it is getting.

Where to Find It

Search Console, Performance section. The new Generative AI report sits underneath the existing Search results report, and Google puts a notice below the graph in Search results linking straight to it.

It isolates impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, the first time these have been separated out rather than folded into general search performance.

What It Gives You, and What It Does Not

Available	Not available
Impressions	Clicks
Breakdown by page	CTR
Breakdown by country and device	Query data
Date range from hourly to monthly	Position

Read that right column carefully, because it defines what conclusions you are entitled to draw.

You can now see that you are appearing in AI surfaces, and which pages are appearing. You cannot see what anyone searched to trigger it, and you cannot see whether any of it produced a visit. Visibility without traffic value.

So the report answers “am I present” and stays silent on “is it worth anything”. Anyone presenting these impressions as a performance metric in a client report is presenting a number with no demonstrated relationship to revenue.

How to Use It Properly

The page-level breakdown is where the value is, and it is genuinely new information.

Sort your pages by AI impressions and look at what is at the top. That list tells you which of your pages Google’s generative systems consider worth surfacing: which is a direct read on what you are considered credible about, from the only party whose opinion determines the outcome.

Three things worth checking in that list:

• Are your commercial pages present at all? Usually not. Informational pages dominate. That gap is a content brief.
• Do the top pages share a format? Specific, factual, clearly structured pages tend to cluster at the top. Broad overview guides tend not to.
• Which pages you expected are absent? Absence of a page you invested heavily in is a stronger signal than the presence of one you did not.

Then pair it with your analytics. The AI impressions here and the AI referral sessions in your analytics are two ends of the same funnel, and the ratio between them is the closest thing currently available to a click-through rate for AI surfaces. I have covered the analytics side of that separately in how to measure AI search traffic.

The Toggle You Should Probably Not Touch

Under Settings there is now a Search generative AI control. It determines whether your links and content can appear in, and help ground, AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI in Discover.

The default is inclusion. Your site participates unless you change it.

Google has been unusually clear about the consequences of opting out, and they are worth stating precisely:

• You receive zero impressions and zero traffic from those generative AI features
• The control is not used as a ranking signal for regular search results, so it should not harm your position in core web search

That second point is the reassurance publishers wanted, and it is a real one. It makes opting out a survivable decision rather than a catastrophic one.

It is still, for almost every commercial site, the wrong decision. You would be removing yourself from a growing surface to protect content that remains fully crawlable and fully visible in ordinary search results. The traffic you forfeit is certain. The content you protect is not actually protected from anything, since normal search indexing continues.

There is a coherent case for opting out if your business model is selling access to the content itself (subscription publishing, paid research, licensed data) where an AI summary genuinely substitutes for the product. That is a narrow set of businesses. If you sell a service or a product and use content to be found, this toggle is a way to become harder to find.

Check where yours is set. Defaults get changed by people who did not think it through, and this one has no obvious symptom.

What This Report Quietly Confirms

One thing worth noting beyond the mechanics.

Google built dedicated reporting for AI surfaces and a dedicated control for participating in them. Companies do not build reporting infrastructure for things they consider temporary. Whatever your view on how much traffic these surfaces currently send, the platform is treating them as a permanent, separately-measured channel.

That is a reasonable basis for taking the channel seriously. It is not a reason to abandon what already works, ordinary organic search still delivers the overwhelming majority of valuable traffic for nearly every site I look at.

Do This Week

1. Open Performance and confirm the Generative AI report is showing data for your property
2. Export the page-level breakdown and sort by impressions
3. Check Settings for the Search generative AI control and confirm it is set to include
4. Compare the top AI-impression pages against your commercial pages, and note the gap
5. Set a monthly review: at current volumes, weekly is noise

Twenty minutes, and you will know more about your AI visibility than you did on 2 June.

Written by Shahzaib Ul Hassan, senior AI SEO consultant and founder of ShazzSEO. Ranking sites since 2009. 500+ websites optimized, 3,000+ students trained.