Search Console configures Performance reports from a prompt

Search Console’s Performance report has always rewarded people who knew exactly which filter, comparison and metric to click through to reach an answer. Google’s new AI-powered configuration, announced on Thursday, 4 December 2025, replaces that clicking with a sentence: describe the analysis, and the report configures itself.

What the tool actually does#

Google frames the feature narrowly, as configuration rather than analysis. It handles three tasks: applying filters by query, page, country, device, search appearance or date range; setting up comparisons, including custom date ranges, without the usual manual steps; and choosing which of the four available metrics, Clicks, Impressions, Average CTR and Average Position, to display based on what was asked.

Google’s own examples show the range it is built for: “Show me queries on phone searches that contain the word ‘sports’ in the last 6 months” for targeted filtering, “Compare traffic for my pages that contain ‘/blog’ in this quarter to the same quarter last year” for a complex comparison, and “Show me the Average CTR and Average Position of my queries in Spain in the last 28 days” for metric selection. Each prompt produces a suggested configuration that a user then applies, rather than a written answer.

Where it stops#

The scope is deliberately narrow. It supports only the Performance report for Search results, not Discover or News. Google also warns that “AI can sometimes misinterpret requests,” and tells users to review the suggested filters before analysing the data rather than trusting them outright. And the feature is built for configuration alone: it cannot sort the table or export data, so both still route through the report’s existing controls.

Access is limited for now. Google is rolling out AI-powered configuration “to a limited set of websites” and says it will expand gradually, so the prompt box will not appear in every account’s Performance report yet.

Why we care#

A tool that turns “compare mobile queries containing sports this quarter to last” into the correct filter, comparison and metric stack removes a real source of friction for anyone who audits Performance data regularly, but it changes nothing about what the underlying numbers mean. The report still counts clicks, impressions, CTR and position the way it always has, so the accuracy warning is the part worth keeping: a prompt that gets misread produces a report that looks authoritative and measures the wrong thing.