For the first time, every website owner can see how often Google shows their pages inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, and can switch those appearances off. On 31 August Google updated its June announcement with one line: the generative AI performance reports and the Search generative AI control in Search Console “have rolled out to all websites worldwide”. Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal confirmed the global rollout the same day.
The report answers a question site owners have asked for two years: is my content used in Google’s AI answers at all? The answer arrives with a notable gap.
How we got here
Google announced both features on 3 June 2026. Mrinalini Loew, General Manager of the Google Search Ecosystem, described the control on Google’s blog as a way for owners to decide whether their site should “appear in and help ground responses” in generative AI Search features. The same day, the Search Central blog introduced a dedicated generative AI performance report in Search Console.
Both started as a test with a subset of website owners in the UK. Search Engine Journal reports that accounts outside the UK began seeing the reports in July, and on 31 August Google declared the rollout complete.
The UK is not a coincidence. According to Farrer & Co’s summary of the decision, the Competition and Markets Authority has imposed conduct requirements on Google that include giving publishers a way to keep their content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, with page-level controls due by March 2027. Google’s global toggle arrives ahead of that deadline and applies everywhere, not just in the UK.
What the report shows
The generative AI performance report lives as an expandable section beneath the main Performance report in Search Console, as Search Engine Roundtable describes it. According to Google’s help documentation, it currently covers two features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says it expects to update that list over time. Search Labs experiments are excluded. A separate report covers generative AI features in Discover.
The single metric is impressions: how many times a link to your site was shown to a user inside one of those features. One detail matters for reading the numbers: if several of your pages appear in the same AI answer, that counts as one impression for the property, not several.
You can break impressions down by page (grouped by canonical URL), by country of the search, by device (desktop, tablet, mobile; Search only, not Discover) and by date, with daily, weekly and monthly views in Pacific time. The usual 1,000-row limit of the Performance report applies, and recent data is marked as preliminary and can change within hours.
Two things are missing, and both matter. There is no click data, so you cannot calculate a click-through rate for AI features. And there is no query data, so you can see which pages appeared but not which questions they answered. The help documentation also says the report may not be visible at all if a site does not have enough AI impressions, or has excluded itself from these features.
The report is a subset view of the Web search type in the main Performance report, not a new pool of data. Impressions you see here were already counted in your totals; you can now tell how many of them came from AI features.
What the control does
The control sits under Settings in Search Console as “Search generative AI control”. The default is to include your site’s links and content in generative AI features. Switching it off removes your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, both as a link and as grounding material for the answer.
Google’s documentation is explicit about three consequences. Exclusion generally takes a few days; most content disappears within one to two days, but cached items may take longer. The setting is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search, so classic blue-link results are unaffected. And it is a property-level switch: you cannot yet exclude some pages and keep others.
It is also separate from the controls you may already use: blocking the Google-Extended crawler limits model training but does not touch AI Overviews, and noindex removes a page from Search altogether. The new toggle is the only one that addresses AI answers specifically.
Google adds one honest caveat: if you opt out, the AI answer does not disappear. It is built from other sites instead, and your competitors’ pages may fill the space you vacated.
What it means for your business
Look at the report before you form an opinion about AI search. Most of the debate about AI Overviews has been conducted without site-level data. Now you have some. Open Search Console, expand the generative AI section under Performance, and check whether the report exists for your property at all. If it does not, your site is not appearing in AI features often enough to register, and the toggle is academic for now.
Read impressions as reach, not as traffic. With no clicks in the report, an impression tells you that Google considered your page a good enough source to cite. It does not tell you anyone came. Compare the AI impression trend with the click trend of the same pages in the main report over the same weeks. If AI impressions rise while clicks fall, you are feeding answers that people no longer click through from. If both rise, AI features are a discovery channel for you.
Do not flip the switch on a hunch. The toggle is property-wide and reversible, but every change takes days to apply and days to reverse, and for that period your report goes quiet. Our view is that opting out makes sense for sites whose revenue depends on the visit itself, such as publishers and comparison sites, and that it rarely makes sense for a business that sells a service: a citation in an AI answer is a recommendation, and the answer will cite somebody. Leave the default on unless the data says otherwise.
Close the gap Google left open. Because the report has no clicks and no queries, the only place you can see what AI-sourced visitors actually do is your own analytics and your CRM. Tag sessions that arrive from Google with the referrer and landing page, and follow them to the enquiry. This is the part of measurement that no platform report will do for you, and it is the reason the tracking we set up in CRM and analytics projects starts from the enquiry and works backwards to the source, rather than the other way round.
Watch the pages, not the totals. Pages that earn AI impressions are the ones Google trusts as sources: usually specific, factual and well structured. That is a direct brief for what to write next, and it feeds the same SEO work that produced those pages in the first place.
Our reading is that Google has shipped a real report and a real switch, worldwide, with the two most important columns still blank. The clicks will come, if only because the CMA expects them. Until then, the report tells you where you are cited, and your own data has to tell you whether that is worth anything.
