The 30-second version
On June 3, 2026, Google began rolling out Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console. For the first time, you can see how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, across both Search and Discover. Clicks are not yet measured. Rollout starts with a subset of UK website owners before a global expansion. In parallel, Google is testing a toggle to pull your content out of AI responses, at the cost of all AI traffic.
On June 3, 2026, Google began rolling out dedicated generative AI performance reports in Search Console, measuring for the first time how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, according to an announcement on the Google Search Central Blog. It is the first official AI-search visibility data made available to site owners.
What the new report shows (and doesn't)
Until now, traffic captured by AI Overviews and AI Mode was blended into Search Console's overall numbers with no breakout. There was no way to know whether a page surfaced inside an AI-generated answer. This report changes that: it isolates a new type of surface.
Specifically, the "Search Generative AI" report shows, per Google:
Data is broken down by page, country, device (Search only) and date, with granularity down to the hour. Asked about the missing clicks by Search Engine Land, a Google spokesperson said: "We're continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful to inform their strategies, and we'll introduce additional metrics over time." In other words, more metrics are coming, with no timeline for clicks.
Why "UK first"? The regional rollout responds to requirements from the UK Competition and Markets Authority. The rest of the world will follow, but no date has been announced.
Why this is a turning point for GEO
For two years, optimizing for generative AI, what we call GEO, as distinct from classic SEO, was done blind. We knew AI Overviews captured queries, but no first-party data confirmed it page by page. The only signals came from third-party tools or manual "does ChatGPT cite me?" tests.
This report finally gives an official, free, URL-level measurement. You can now identify which pages already appear in AI answers and which never do. That is exactly the feedback loop that structured classic SEO for fifteen years, and that GEO badly lacked. Bing had led the way with its own AI visibility metrics in Webmaster Tools; Google is now catching up and, in effect, setting a market standard.
The other announcement: a button to block AI
In parallel, Google is testing a new toggle in Search Console to remove a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode. The trade-off is explicit in Google's own wording: "sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features." Cut the AI off and you cut off the traffic it sends you. The setting does not, however, affect your standard search rankings.
For 99% of small businesses, this button is a trap, not an option. Opting out means going invisible on the fastest-growing search surface. The right move isn't to block AI: it's to produce content the AI wants to cite.
What to do now
- Enable the report as soon as it reaches your account, and review it weekly, alongside your classic performance report.
- Map your "cited" vs "invisible" pages in AI. The pages already appearing show what works: structure, answer format, freshness.
- Replicate the winning signals on the missing pages: direct answers up top, sourced data, clean markup. Our GEO vs SEO breakdown walks through the method.
- Don't confuse impressions with clicks. An AI impression with no click is still useful brand exposure, but don't count it as traffic until Google ships click data.
What this article doesn't cover
At publication, the report is only available to a subset of UK sites, so we could not test the interface ourselves, and the screenshots circulating online come from UK accounts. We also don't cover the full way AI Mode picks and displays its citations here, nor how Google's AI adoption curve reshapes search demand: both are treated separately. Finally, until clicks are exposed, no impressions-to-conversions correlation can be proven: be careful with ROI estimates.
The Cicéro take
Google just turned GEO from a bet into a measurable discipline. As long as you can't measure, you can't optimize, and as long as you can't optimize, you improvise. This report ends the improvising. The companies that watch these numbers weekly will build a lead that others spend months closing.
Sources
- → Google Search Central Blog: "Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console" (June 2026)
- → Search Engine Land: report details, Google spokesperson quote and the blocking toggle (June 3, 2026)
Frequently asked questions
What do the new Search Console generative AI reports measure?
Does the report show clicks from AI Overviews?
When will the report be available outside the UK?
Can you stop your content from appearing in AI Overviews?
Growth and SEO content strategist, I founded Cicéro to help businesses build lasting organic visibility on Google and in AI-generated answers alike. Every piece of content we produce is designed to convert, not just to exist.
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