Definition
The generative AI performance report is a Google Search Console report that shows how often links to your site appeared in Google's generative AI search features, currently AI Overviews and AI Mode. It reports impressions only, grouped by page, country, device and date.
Google announced the report on June 3, 2026 on the Search Central blog, together with a separate report for generative AI features in Discover. It first went to a subset of sites, starting in the UK on the same day the Competition and Markets Authority imposed its publisher conduct requirement on Google, and Google says it reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026. The same AI impressions are still counted inside the regular Performance report; the new report isolates them.
According to the help center documentation, an impression is counted each time a link to your site is shown in a generative AI feature, under the same counting rules Google uses elsewhere. Other details:
- The Pages dimension uses the final URL after redirects and assigns most data to the canonical URL.
- A search type filter separates text queries from multimodal searches such as Google Lens and Circle to Search.
- Chart totals are aggregated by property, so two links from one site in the same answer count once; page-level table rows are aggregated by page.
- Search Labs experiments are excluded, and the usual 1,000-row table limit applies.
What the report leaves out matters as much. There are no clicks, no click-through rate, no queries and no position, and AI Overviews and AI Mode are combined into a single series. If the report is missing, Google says the site usually has too few AI impressions or has opted out through the Search generative AI control.
For GEO teams this is the first AI search visibility number that comes from Google itself. The most useful check is to compare AI impressions per page with the clicks the same page earns in the Performance report. Pages with growing AI impressions and flat clicks are where the Great Decoupling is happening, and where on-page calls to action or richer data may win back a visit. Check which countries drive AI impressions before localizing content, and use the trend line as a baseline before changing the opt-out setting.
Because the report has no queries, it cannot say which questions triggered an appearance. Teams fill that gap with prompt-level tracking, which shows the actual answer, the competing sources and the AI Overview impressions context for specific prompts, and with Bing's AI Performance report, which does show grounding queries. Our post on search insights for Google and Bing shows how Search Console and Bing data can sit next to AI citation data per page.
More data may follow. The CMA's interpretive notes list impressions, click-throughs and click-through rate as metrics Google should give publishers, and Google has said it plans to add metrics over time.
Examples of Generative AI Performance Report (Search Console)
- A UK travel publisher with early access in June 2026 finds that 40% of its AI impressions come from three destination guides, while its booking pages barely appear in AI Overviews at all.
- An electronics retailer filters the report to 'Web: multimodal' and sees that product pages earn AI impressions mostly from Google Lens searches on mobile, which shifts its image optimization priorities.
- Before deciding whether to opt out of AI features, a news site exports twelve weeks of AI impressions per section and compares them with section-level clicks from the main Performance report.
- A SaaS company sees AI impressions for its pricing page rise after adding a comparison table, but clicks on that page stay flat, so it adds a calculator that an AI answer cannot replace.
