Search Console’s AI Overviews and AI Mode Report, and the Opt-Out Setting: A Plain-English Guide

Search Console’s Generative AI performance report counts how many times links to your site were shown in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. It reports impressions only, split by page, country, device and date. There are no queries, no clicks and no position. Google rolled it out to every site worldwide on 31 August 2026. The opt-out is a single setting, Settings > Search generative AI, with Include (the default) or Exclude. Excluding removes your links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features within a few days, and Google says it does not affect your rankings anywhere else.

We read every Google page cited here on 13 October 2026 and quote them directly. Where a step needs a signed-in Search Console account to see, we say so rather than describe a screen we have not verified.

What the report shows

There is one metric, and Google defines it plainly:

Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.

It covers two features today: AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google says it expects to add to that list over time. Experiments in Search Labs are not included. Google Discover has its own, separate generative AI report, with page, country and date dimensions but no device split.

Two counting rules explain most confusing totals. The chart is aggregated by property: if two of your pages appear in the same AI answer, the chart counts one impression, while the Pages table counts one per URL. That is why the chart and table totals can differ. The usual Performance report limits also apply, including the 1,000-row table limit. Values shown as “~” or “-” export as zeros.

What it does not show: queries, clicks, position

• No queries. You cannot see which searches produced an AI Overview that linked to you.
• No clicks. Clicks on links in AI Overviews and AI Mode are real clicks, but Search Console counts them in the normal Performance report under the Web search type, mixed with every other click. As of 13 October 2026 Google documents no filter that isolates them.
• No position or click-through rate.
• No Gemini app and no other assistants. It covers Google Search features only.

Google is explicit that the AI data was not moved out of the main report. The new report is an extra view of numbers that were already there:

This data is included in the overall performance report, where it will continue to be tracked to give site owners an overview of the overall visibility of their site in Google Search.

Analytics does not fill the gap either. GA4’s AI Assistant channel, launched on 13 May 2026, excludes Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, so that traffic stays in Organic Search. We cover the workarounds in how to track AI traffic in GA4.

When it arrived, and how far back the data goes

Google has not documented how far back the report’s data goes. Check the earliest date your own date picker allows before you promise anyone a year-on-year comparison.

One documentation gap we noticed on 13 October 2026: Google’s older “AI features and your website” page (last updated 10 December 2025) still says “There are no additional technical requirements” to appear as a supporting link. The newer AI optimization guide (last updated 10 July 2026) adds a second gate:

In addition to the technical requirements for Search, a site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console to be eligible for display in generative AI features on Google Search.

Since Include is the default, this changes nothing for most sites. It matters when a site has been switched to Exclude, which brings us to the setting.

How to open the report

1. Sign in to Search Console and choose the property. A Domain property (example.com) gives the whole-site view across subdomains and protocols.
2. Google’s help files the report under Performance reports as “Generative AI performance report (Search)”, next to the Discover version. Look in the Performance section of the menu.
3. Or go straight to the address Google links from its help page: search.google.com/search-console/performance/search-analytics/ai. The Discover version is at search.google.com/search-console/performance/discover/ai.
4. Set the date range, then pick a tab above the table: Pages, Countries, Devices or Dates.
5. Use the Search type filter if you want typed searches separated from camera and image searches.
6. Use the export button to download both the chart and table data.

Not seeing the report?

Google gives two reasons. Either the site “hasn't received enough impressions in generative AI features on Google Search”, or it has been set to Exclude. A new or small site can simply have too few appearances to show anything yet.

The AI features opt-out: one setting, three choices

Coverage of the launch disagrees on whether Google added one opt-out or two. Google’s help page settles it. There is one control, the Search generative AI control, at Settings > Search generative AI. It governs three surfaces together: AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover. You cannot opt out of one and stay in the others.

The “two settings” idea has understandable sources. There are two reports (Search and Discover). Google-Extended is a separate robots.txt control for AI training. And the Inherit option makes a simple on/off look like three states. None of those is a second opt-out for AI Overviews.

Your site's content is prevented from being visible to users in Search generative AI features, including being linked to within these features and helping with grounding AI responses in these features. You won't receive any traffic or impressions from these features.

What Exclude does and does not do

How fast it takes effect

Content will be excluded within 1-2 days after the control goes live, but some content may take longer to be excluded due to caching and propagation across Google systems.

Excluding one section instead of the whole site

The control works per property, and child properties can override their parent. A publisher who wants only its /news/ section out of AI features can verify https://example.com/news/ as a URL-prefix property and set Exclude there, leaving the rest of the site on Include. Google says owners of the top-level domain property see a notification on the control page when a child property overrides them.

Owners of a child property can choose to follow its parent property's Search generative AI control or change it for the specific child property and its subpages.

The flip side: anyone with owner access to a URL-prefix property can switch that section off. If one part of a site has zero AI impressions while the rest is fine, check its child property first.

How it compares with Google’s other AI controls

Only the page-level controls are visible from outside, which is why a scanner can check them. You can check your snippet controls and Google-Extended rules for free, and read the full eligibility rules in why a page isn’t in AI Overviews.

Nobody can see this setting from outside, including us

The control lives in your Search Console account. It writes nothing to robots.txt, your HTML or your headers, so no crawler, SEO tool or audit, ours included, can tell whether a site is excluded. If AI impressions drop to zero overnight, check Settings > Search generative AI on the domain property and on every child property before you hunt for a technical cause. If you work on a client’s site, ask for Search Console access and look yourself. It is the one AI eligibility gate an outside audit cannot confirm.

How to read it alongside the normal Performance report

Because AI impressions also sit inside the normal report, the useful work is comparing the two. A routine that takes about twenty minutes a month:

1. Pick one date range and use it in both reports. Use whole weeks or months, because the newest days can be preliminary.
2. Export the generative AI report from the Pages tab. Export the Performance report with search type Web, also from its Pages tab.
3. Join the two files on URL in a spreadsheet. Each page now has AI impressions next to its total impressions, clicks and click-through rate.
4. Divide AI impressions by total impressions for a rough share of each page’s visibility that comes from AI features. Treat it as approximate: Google has not documented how a page shown both in an AI Overview and as a blue link for the same search is de-duplicated across the two reports.
5. Sort by that share. Pages with a high AI share and a falling click-through rate are where AI answers may be satisfying the search before a click. Pages with strong organic impressions but zero AI impressions are worth checking for snippet controls.
6. Repeat the comparison by country and device.

Three counting rules from Google’s Performance report documentation explain the odd numbers you will see:

• AI Overviews take one position. Google: “An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position.” A page cited in an Overview can show a high average position and few clicks.
• AI Mode follow-ups are new queries. Google: “If a user asks a follow-up question within AI Mode, they are essentially performing a new query.”
• Impressions do not need a scroll. In general an impression counts when a link is on the current page of results, “whether or not the item is scrolled into view”, unless the user has to click to reveal it.

Should you exclude your site?

For most businesses, no. Excluding gives up every impression and click AI Overviews and AI Mode send you, and Google says other sites’ content “may appear similar to yours” in your place. The case for it is narrower: publishers whose business depends on people reading the original, or sites that have measured a real loss of clicks on pages that AI answers summarise.

If you are weighing it, measure first. Google suggests exactly that: the report “can help you get an idea of how changing your control may impact traffic to your site.” Run the routine above for several weeks, consider excluding only the section at stake through a child property, and remember the change can be reversed but takes days either way.

Google’s report counts impressions. Bing’s equivalent counts citations and shows the search phrases behind them, which makes it the better source for finding which page an AI answer leans on. See Bing’s AI Performance report and grounding queries.

Checklist

• Verify a Domain property in Search Console so the report and the control cover every subdomain and protocol.
• Open Settings > Search generative AI and confirm it says Include, or Inherit from a parent that does.
• Check every URL-prefix child property for an override.
• Export the generative AI report by page each month and note what you changed on each page; the report has no queries, so your notes are the only context.
• Join it with the Performance report by URL to see AI share and click-through rate together.
• On pages with zero AI impressions, check nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet.
• Fix canonicals so the credit lands on the URL you want.

The report tells you whether Google’s AI features show your pages. It cannot tell you why. The why is mostly ordinary SEO, since Google says these features are “rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems”, plus whether crawlers can reach and read the page at all. Run a free audit to check the parts you control, each with the evidence grade behind it.