Search Console's AI Mode Report: What It Shows and Hides

The Search Console AI Mode report, officially the Generative AI performance report, counts how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. It has no clicks, queries, competitors or answer text. It confirms you were shown, not for which question, next to whom or saying what.

Google rolled the report out to all websites on August 31, 2026, together with a control that lets you remove your site from these features. Both deserve a careful read before anyone puts the numbers in a board deck or flips the switch.

Where the report is, and what you can filter by

Open All reports and tools, then Performance reports, then Generative AI performance report (Search). Google's help page also links to it directly.

It covers two Search features, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Generative AI features in Discover have a separate report. The help page lists what you can change:

• Dimensions: pages (the final URL after redirects, mostly assigned to the canonical), countries, dates and devices.
• Time granularity: Google's launch post lists hourly, daily, weekly and monthly views.
• Filter: search type, split into "Web: text-based" and "Web: multimodal", where an image formed part of the search.
• Export: chart and table data, with values shown as ~ or - exported as zero.

Two counting rules change how you read the totals. The chart aggregates by property, so two of your URLs in one AI Overview count as a single impression; the table aggregates by page when you group by page. And the usual performance-report limits, including the 1,000-row cap in the interface, apply here too.

If you cannot see the report, Google gives three reasons: the rollout has not reached your property, your site has too few impressions in these features, or someone excluded the site from them.

The report shows	The report does not show
Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode combined	Clicks from those features
Which of your pages appeared	The queries or prompts that triggered them
Country, device and date of the impression	A split between AI Overviews and AI Mode
Text versus image-assisted searches	Competitors cited next to you
Trend over time	The answer text, your position in it, or its sentiment

What the report leaves out

It leaves out everything that explains an impression: the clicks it produced, the query behind it, the surface it came from and what the answer said.

Clicks are the most confusing gap. Google's AI features documentation says traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the standard Performance report under the "Web" search type. So the clicks exist in Search Console, blended with every other organic click, with no way to separate them. Google's impressions and clicks guide adds two rules worth knowing. All links in an AI Overview share a single position. And a follow-up question in AI Mode counts as a new query, so a long conversation can produce impressions for queries you never targeted.

The help page lists no dimension or filter that separates AI Mode from AI Overviews, despite the report's common nickname. We checked the dimensions, the filter and the export notes on Google's help page, and none of them splits the two surfaces.

Queries are missing too, and so are competitors, answer text and sentiment. You can look up a page's queries in the standard Performance report, but you cannot tell which of them produced the AI impression. Search Engine Journal's coverage of the global rollout reached the same conclusion: the report shows where pages appear, with no click data and no query-level data.

Reading AI impressions next to 68% zero-click searches

Read an AI impression as a complete interaction in many cases, since most searches already end without a click. SparkToro found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024.

The study used Similarweb's US clickstream panel and excluded Google's mobile app, where SparkToro expects zero-click behavior to run higher. The same data put AI Mode at 0.34% of searches in that period, a reminder that the AI Mode share of your impressions is likely small next to AI Overviews.

Three reading rules follow:

• AI impressions rising while clicks stay flat is an expected pattern. The answer may have satisfied the searcher.
• Do not divide your organic clicks by AI impressions to get an "AI CTR". The clicks in the Performance report include every organic result, so the ratio mixes two populations.
• Compare pages against themselves over time. When a page's AI impressions climb while its clicks fall, the answer may now carry that page's information. Check whether it still carries your name.

The attribution guide covers the part no report shows: buyers who read an answer, form a shortlist and arrive later through a brand search.

Whether to opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode

Most brands should not. Opting out removes your links and content from these features while similar content from other sites stays in them.

The Search generative AI control lives in Search Console under Settings, then Search generative AI. It offers three choices: include (the default), exclude, or inherit from a parent property. Google's help page is specific about the effects of excluding:

• Your links and content stop appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, and your content stops grounding those answers. You get no impressions or traffic from them.
• "Content from other sites will still be available in those features, and it may appear similar to yours."
• The control "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search", and it does not override Merchant Center or Google Ads participation.
• It does not affect AI training. For that, Google points to the Google-Extended token.
• Exclusion takes effect within one to two days after the control goes live, and some content can take longer to drop out.

Site type	Recommendation	Why
B2B or SaaS brand	Stay included	AI answers shape shortlists before a buyer visits; leaving means competitors define the category without you
Local or service business	Stay included	Answers about providers, prices and hours draw on your pages or on directories that may be out of date
E-commerce store	Stay included	Product answers draw on your pages, and Merchant Center participation continues regardless
Publisher whose revenue depends on the click	Test on one section first	You trade AI visibility for the chance of a click; measure that trade before applying it sitewide
Site with licensing obligations on its content	Consider excluding the affected property	The control removes your content from answers; it does not stop training, which needs Google-Extended

Inheritance makes a clean test possible. A URL-prefix child property can override its parent, so a publisher can exclude one section, keep a similar section included, and compare clicks and impressions for eight weeks before deciding. Remember that Google Discover's generative features are part of the same switch.

A monthly workflow across Search Console, prompt tracking and analytics

Use Search Console to find the pages that AI features show, prompt tracking to see the answers themselves, and analytics to see the visits. One pass a month is enough for most sites.

1. Export the Generative AI performance report by page for the last full month and the month before.
2. Export the standard Performance report for the same pages and months: clicks, impressions and CTR for the Web search type.
3. For each page, compute its AI impression share (AI impressions divided by total impressions) and the change in clicks. Flag pages where AI impressions rose and clicks fell.
4. For flagged pages, pull the page's top queries from the standard report and turn them into prompts. Run those prompts through prompt tracking to see the answer text, whether your brand is named and cited, and which sources appear instead.
5. In your analytics tool, pull sessions and conversions from AI assistants by landing page, using referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com and the utm_source=chatgpt.com tag ChatGPT adds. AI referral traffic benchmarks explains how to set up that channel in GA4.
6. Choose an action per page: add the missing facts the answer gets wrong, restructure a page that ranks but never gets cited, or accept a zero-click page and track brand search instead.
7. Log each change with its date, so next month's comparison has something to attribute.

Step 4 is where Search Console runs out and a tracker takes over. Citlyze's prompt tracking runs your prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and more, checks Google AI Overviews and AI Mode weekly, and records the answer text and sources for each run.

If you are new to the surfaces themselves, what a Google AI Overview is and how AI Overviews and AI Mode differ cover the basics this workflow assumes.

Export it this month, then read the answers

Export the report, match its pages to your top prompts, and read the answers those pages appear in. The impressions tell you where to look; the answers tell you whether being shown helped you. Every Citlyze plan includes the weekly AI Overviews and AI Mode check next to the daily chat engines, from $29 a month, with a 14-day trial and no card.