Search Console now reports impressions from Google's AI features

Search Console now answers “how visible are we inside AI Overviews” with a real number instead of a shrug. The generative AI performance report separates impressions inside AI features from impressions in ordinary search results, and Google says it now reaches every website worldwide.

What the report contains#

Impressions, broken four ways. How many times links to your site were shown inside a generative AI feature on Google Search, with pages, countries, devices and date dimensions down to hourly granularity. Both the chart and the table export.

The report as Google shipped it, from the announcement post. The domain and numbers shown are Google’s own placeholder example, not a real site’s data. Source: Google Search Central.

Discover gets its own report. A second, separate view covers generative AI features in Discover, which matters for publishers whose Discover traffic behaves nothing like their search traffic.

The rollout question is closed. Google’s post carries a note added after launch: as of 31 August 2026, the reports reached every website worldwide, after an initial run on a subset of properties. A property still showing no data likely has no qualifying AI-feature impressions yet, not an access problem.

Why this changes the measurement problem#

Every alternative so far has been inferred. Teams reverse-engineered AI visibility from unexplained impression growth without matching clicks, or bought a third-party panel that samples prompts and guesses which domains get cited. Neither number reconciles against Google’s own reporting.

A first-party count does. Same measurement lineage as the rest of Search Console, covers your whole property rather than a sampled prompt set, and can be exported and stored, so the trend line survives the next interface redesign.

What it does not settle#

An impression is not a citation, and a citation is not a visit. The report says your pages appeared, not whether the generated answer quoted them or buried them at the bottom of a source list. Treat it as a presence metric and pair it with your own analytics before anyone in the room turns it into a revenue claim.

Why we care#

Check whether the report is live on your property, then export the full window immediately - interface-bound history has a habit of disappearing when a report gets redesigned. Compare the pages that actually surface in AI features against the pages you assumed were your AI-visible set. In most audits those two lists overlap far less than people expect, and the gap is the real work.