The Generative AI performance report in Google Search Console shows how often links to your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It groups those impressions by page, country, date and device. It shows no clicks and no queries. Google says the report reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026 (Search Console Help).
This report proves that Google showed your page inside an AI answer on a given day, and it says nothing about clicks. Clicks sit in another report, and the questions people typed are not in this one at all. Unless it duplicates a canonical page, a page that never appears here was not shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode, as far as Google's own count goes.
What the report shows
The default view is a chart of total impressions for your property, with a table underneath. An impression here is one time a link to your site was shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. The table has four tabs, and you narrow the search type with a filter at the top.
| Tab or filter | What it does | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | Groups impressions by the final URL the AI feature linked to, after redirects. | Most data goes to the canonical URL, so a duplicate page can look empty. |
| Countries | Groups impressions by the country the search came from. | An empty country may not have AI Overviews at all. |
| Dates | Groups impressions by day, week or month. | All dates are in Pacific Time. |
| Devices | Groups impressions by desktop, tablet or mobile. | Useful when your mobile template differs from the desktop one. |
| Search type filter | Switches between “Web: text-based” and “Web: multimodal”. | Multimodal covers searches where an image was part of the search. |
The Countries tab needs more care than it seems to. Google publishes the list of countries, territories and languages where AI Overviews are available (AI Overviews in Google Search). Check that list before you treat a country with no impressions as a problem.
Before you start
- You need a verified property in Search Console. I would work from a domain property where you can.
- Your site has to be included in Search generative AI features. Include is the default. A property that has a parent follows the parent by default, which Google explains on its Search generative AI control page.
- Your pages need some impressions in AI Overviews or AI Mode first. Google says the report may not show for a site without enough of them.
Steps
Step 1. Open the report
Sign in to Search Console and choose the property. Google's help center lists this report under Performance reports, beside Performance report (Search). The help page also carries a link labeled “Open the Generative AI performance report”. I could not confirm from an official page how the entry is worded in the Search Console menu itself. If you do not see it, use that link.
Step 2. Read the chart
The chart shows total impressions for the whole property over the period you picked. It counts your site once per appearance. Two of your pages in the same AI Overview count as one impression in the chart. A dotted line at the end marks preliminary data, which Google says may change over the next few hours. Leave the last day out of any comparison.
Step 3. Switch the table between tabs
Open Pages first, then Countries, Dates and Devices. The Pages tab counts each page separately. That is why its total can be higher than the chart total. The usual limits of the Performance report apply here too, including 1,000 rows in the table.
Step 4. Filter the search type when you need to
Use the filter at the top to switch between “Web: text-based” and “Web: multimodal”. A store with visual products may find searches that started from a photo under multimodal.
Step 5. Export the table and date it
The export button downloads the chart data and the table. The file turns every tilde or hyphen in the report into a zero. Save each export with the date and the property name in the file name. Without them, you will not know next month what the number covered.
Step 6. Put it next to the ordinary Performance report
Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in Performance report (Search), under the Web search type, together with every other Google click. Google treats an AI Overview as one result position. Every link inside it gets that same position (how impressions, position and clicks are counted). The fifth link reports the same position as the first, which is generous to the fifth. I read the two reports together: impressions from this one, clicks and queries from the other.
Step 7. Check the Search generative AI control
Go to Settings, then Search generative AI. You will see three choices: “Include my site's links and content in Search generative AI features”, “Exclude my site's links and content from Search generative AI features” and “Inherit control from parent”. A property follows the nearest parent that has its own setting. If no parent has one, it follows the top level domain property.
When I review inherited permissions in an audit, my first question is who owns the parent. I ask the same question here, since Google says a change at the parent level applies to your property automatically.
Check that it worked
Pick three pages you have seen linked in an AI Overview. Find them in the Pages tab for the same dates. If they are there, you are reading the right report on the right property. Your own searches are a weak test, though. Google says results depend on the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching.
If it did not work
- If the report is missing, Google gives two reasons. The rollout reached some properties later than others, and it finished on August 31, 2026. The site may also have too few impressions, and an exclusion looks the same, so check the setting on your property and on its parent.
- If a new page shows nothing, make sure Google knows the page exists before you read anything into a zero. In September 2026, Google was still reading a copy of our own sitemap index from September 18, and three pages we published on September 21 stayed unknown to Google for three days. We submitted the index again on September 24, and Google fetched it within the minute and indexed all three pages the same day. Our daily routine now checks that Google holds every sitemap we list.
- If the chart and the table disagree, that is expected. The chart counts per property and the Pages tab counts per page.
- If you came for queries, this report has none. The ordinary Performance report has queries, but it mixes AI features with classic results, so neither report ties a query to an AI Overview.
- If yesterday's number changed, it was preliminary. The newest data can change until Google finishes collecting it.
Platform notes
Nothing in this report depends on how your site is built. A Shopify store, a WordPress site and a hand coded site see the same tabs. Google builds the report from its own Web search data.
What Visibility Mesh checks and what it does not
Visibility Mesh does not connect to your Search Console. Our scan reads each page as it is served. It checks, one name at a time, whether eight crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity are allowed in. We built it to answer whether a page can be read and quoted at all, which comes before any question about impressions. I would run the scan before blaming a page for low numbers here, and read this report again after every fix.
Questions people ask
Why can I not see the Generative AI performance report in Search Console?
Google's help page gives two reasons. Some properties received the report later than others, and the rollout reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026. Older forum threads may describe accounts that did not have it yet. The other reason is too few impressions in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google says that can happen when the site is excluded under Settings, Search generative AI. A property that inherits an exclusion from its parent is excluded too.
Does the Generative AI performance report show clicks or search queries?
It shows neither. Google describes the report as impressions only, grouped by page, country, date and device, with a filter for text based and multimodal web search. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the ordinary Performance report under the Web search type. They sit together with every other Google click, so they cannot be separated there either. Google's launch post of June 3, 2026, mentions adding more metrics over time.
How are AI Overview and AI Mode clicks and impressions counted in Search Console?
Google treats an AI Overview as one result position. Every link inside it gets the position of the overview. Standard impression rules apply, and Google counts a click when someone follows a link to a page outside Google Search. In AI Mode, position follows the rules of a normal results page. A follow up question counts as a new query with its own impressions, positions and clicks. Both appear in the Performance report under the Web search type. Data from Search Labs experiments is left out.
Sources
- Google, Generative AI performance report (Search), Search Console Help. No update date is shown on the page; read September 26, 2026.
- Google, Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, Google Search Central Blog, June 3, 2026; read September 26, 2026.
- Google, Search generative AI control, Search Console Help. No update date is shown; read September 26, 2026.
- Google, What are impressions, position, and clicks?, Search Console Help. No update date is shown; read September 26, 2026.
- Google, Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup, Search Console Help. No update date is shown; read September 26, 2026.
- Google, AI features and your website, Google Search Central, last updated December 10, 2025; read September 26, 2026.
- Google, AI Overviews in Google Search, Google Search Help. No update date is shown; read September 26, 2026.
This guide is one part of how to measure AI visibility. The other parts are how to read the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools and tracking AI traffic in Google Analytics. For what to do with the numbers, read appearing in Google AI Overviews and whether AI visibility pays off.
Work through the six checks in How to check if AI can read your website, or hand them to your developer.
If the numbers in this report do not make sense for your site, tell us what's not working. Describe the problem in your own words, and a person will reply within one business day.