Google now counts every time you appear in an AI answer — but not the clicks

TL;DR: Google Search Console is the free dashboard Google gives every site owner to see how their site does in Google Search. On 31 August Google finished switching on two new things there, for every site in the world. The first counts how often your pages showed up inside Google’s AI-written answers. The second is a single on/off switch that pulls your site out of those answers completely. The report counts appearances only. It will not tell you how many people clicked through, or what they had typed into the search box. The switch covers your entire site in one go, and the finer, page-by-page version is not due until March 2027.

First, what the report actually counts

One word does most of the work here: impression. In this report it means one specific thing — a link to your site was displayed to somebody inside one of Google’s AI answers. Not a click. Not a visit. Just that your link was on the screen.

Two AI surfaces are covered, according to Google’s own documentation. AI Overviews is the AI-written summary that sits at the top of an ordinary results page, above the familiar blue links. AI Mode is the separate tab where you hold a back-and-forth conversation with Google instead of scanning a list of results. Google Discover, the feed of suggested articles on your phone, is measured too, but in a report of its own.

You can break the number down by page, by country, by device and by date. Experiments running in Search Labs are left out.

The rollout was slow and quiet. Google introduced the report in June for a limited set of sites, widened it in waves through the summer, and finished on 31 August. If you open Search Console and find nothing there, that is not necessarily a fault. Google only builds the report for properties with enough AI impressions to be worth charting.

What it deliberately leaves out

Here is the part that changes how much the report is worth to you.

There are no clicks. No click-through rate, which is the share of people who saw your link and actually pressed it. No queries, so you cannot see what somebody asked before your page turned up in the answer. And nothing that tells you whether your page was the main source Google leaned on, or one of six links tacked to the side of a summary that answered the question on its own.

So you get one half of the sentence. You now know that you appeared 4,000 times last month in AI answers. You still have no idea whether those 4,000 appearances sent you eleven visits or eleven hundred, and no idea which questions produced them.

That gap is not permanent. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, the regulator that forced much of this into existence, expects click data to follow and has Google filing compliance reports every six months for the first year. For now, treat the number as a presence signal and nothing more. It is a fine input for “are we visible at all” and a bad input for “is this worth money”.

The switch is blunter than it looks

The second feature is the one to be careful with. In Search Console’s Settings there is now a Search generative AI control, and it removes your site’s links and content from the same three surfaces the report measures.

It is property-level. A property is one site as Search Console knows it, so this is your whole domain, on or off, with no middle setting. Google is direct about the consequence: sites that opt out receive no traffic and no impressions from those features at all. Google also says the setting is not used as a ranking signal anywhere else in Search, so switching it off should not drag down your ordinary blue-link results.

Two things people are already conflating, so worth separating clearly. This switch is about appearing in Google’s AI answers. It is not about training Google’s AI models, which is still governed separately through Google-Extended. Turning one off does not turn the other off.

The granular version is coming, just not soon. The CMA gave Google until 3 March 2027 to ship page-by-page controls, with broader publisher controls due in December 2026. Until then, a publisher who wants their news pages out of AI answers but their product pages in has no supported way to do that. We went through the opt-out decision itself in more depth here — the arithmetic has not changed much, but the tooling now exists.

What to do with this in the next week

Open the report for every property you manage and write down the baseline. You want a number for August before you change anything, because from here on you can only measure movement against a starting point you actually recorded.

Compare AI impressions against ordinary Search impressions per page. Pages with a high ratio are being consumed inside answers rather than visited, and those are the pages where you should be looking hard at your analytics for a traffic decline that had no ranking cause.

Do not flip the switch on a client’s behalf without a written decision from them. It is site-wide, it costs you every AI-surface impression you currently earn, and the reversible, targeted version is six months out.

And treat Google’s number as one of several. It covers Google’s own surfaces only, which is a shrinking share of where people now ask questions.

That last point is the practical limit of this report. Google reports two AI surfaces and gives you no queries. Seeing all six answer surfaces side by side, rather than one vendor’s view of itself, is the gap to close, and the site-wide technical work decides whether you show up in those answers in the first place.

Key takeaways

• On 31 August 2026 Google finished rolling out the generative AI performance report and the Search generative AI control to every site worldwide.
• The report counts impressions only — how often your links appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode. No clicks, no click-through rate, no queries.
• Discover has its own separate report; Search Labs experiments are excluded.
• The opt-out control is property-level: your whole site, all or nothing. Opting out means no traffic and no impressions from those features.
• Google says the control is not a ranking signal elsewhere in Search, and it is separate from AI training, which Google-Extended still governs.
• Page-level controls are due 3 March 2027 under the CMA’s timeline, with wider publisher controls in December 2026.
• Record your August baseline now, and read the number as evidence of presence, not of value.