Google just opened its AI visibility report to every site. It counts impressions, not clicks.

Since August 31, 2026, any site owner can open Google Search Console and see how often their pages were shown inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google finished the worldwide rollout of its Search generative AI performance report on that date, after announcing it on June 3, 2026 and limiting it to a sample of sites for most of the summer. The report counts impressions, not clicks: it measures your exposure inside Google's written answers, not the traffic that exposure sends you.

What exactly is in the report Google opened on August 31, 2026?

The Search generative AI performance report measures impressions of your pages across two Google Search surfaces: AI Overviews, the written answers that sit above the blue links, and AI Mode, Google's conversational tab. Google defines an impression as the number of times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. A separate report covers generative AI features in Google Discover.

The note Google added to its June 3, 2026 announcement is unambiguous: as of August 31, 2026, these insights are rolled out to all websites worldwide. The Search generative AI performance report breaks that data down four ways.

• Pages: which URLs on your site appeared inside generative AI features on Google Search.
• Countries: where your impressions come from, which is how you separate one market from another.
• Devices: desktop, tablet and mobile, available for Search results.
• Dates: performance over time, with hourly, daily, weekly and monthly granularity.

The report shows no clicks and no queries. In its June 3, 2026 announcement, Google says it is continuing to work with website owners on which insights would be most useful, and mentions adding further metrics over time, with no date attached. Google also states that a site which has not received enough impressions in these features will not see the report at all.

Why is an impression report not a traffic report?

An impression inside an AI Overview means Google displayed a link to your site underneath a written answer. It does not mean anyone visited you. The gap between the two is measured. Pew Research Center, in a July 22, 2025 analysis of the browsing data of 900 US adults during March 2025, found that users who encountered an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who did not see one. Clicks on a link inside the AI summary itself happened in just 1% of visits to pages carrying one.

Ahrefs measured the same squeeze from the ranking side. In a study published on February 4, 2026 across 300,000 keywords, Ahrefs found the click-through rate of position one is 58% lower when an AI Overview is present, comparing December 2023 with December 2025. Rising impressions alongside falling visits is therefore an ordinary outcome, and Google's new report, on its own, will never show you that half of the picture.

The useful reading is a cross-check between two reports Search Console deliberately keeps apart: the generative AI report for impressions, and the standard performance report for clicks, over the same pages and the same window. That comparison tells you whether exposure inside Google's answers brings visits or replaces them. We walked through that shift in the article "What AI Overviews did to traffic in France, in nine days".

What does this change for a small or mid-sized business?

For a small business, August 31, 2026 is the first date it can check for itself, free of charge and without a third-party tool, whether Google's AI features show its pages at all. Google rolled AI Overviews out to France on July 22, 2026, the last major market to receive them, which means English-speaking sites sit on a considerably longer run of data than French ones behind this same report. Nothing has to be installed on the site to read it.

What the report leaves out is still most of the subject. Google's report measures Google, and nothing else. It says nothing about ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Copilot, none of which publish an equivalent view of the sources they show. A business that treats the Search Console figure as its AI visibility number is reading one surface and calling it the market.

There is a third blind spot, and it matters most to businesses selling a specific service. The generative AI performance report carries no query data. You will learn that a service page was shown inside AI Mode, never which question prompted it. That makes it impossible to tell visibility on the question that ends in a sale from visibility on a question asked out of curiosity.

Should you use the switch that removes your site from Google's AI answers?

Google shipped a second setting on the same day, August 31, 2026: the Search generative AI control, found in the settings of each Search Console property. Every property is included by default. Choosing the opposite is heavier than it looks.

• Excluding removes links to your site from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and stops your content being used to ground the generated answers.
• Google states plainly that you will then receive no traffic and no impressions from those features.
• Google also states that content from other sites will remain available in those answers, and that it may look similar to yours.
• The control is not a ranking signal: Google specifies it is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search.
• A change takes one to two days to take effect, and some content can take longer because of caching and propagation.

This switch does not settle the training question either. Google writes that the Search generative AI control does not affect AI training, and points to Google-Extended for limiting the training of the models behind those answers. An owner who ticks the exclusion box to avoid feeding AI therefore removes their own visibility while leaving training untouched, and hands the answer to competitors. It is the trap described in the article "Blocking AI bots with one click can cost you Google": one click to set, a commercial consequence that lasts.

What should you actually do with the report?

The generative AI performance report answers one binary question first: does Google show your site inside its written answers, yes or no? An empty or missing report is already an answer. It means the site has not reached the minimum impression volume Google requires to display the report, which is another way of saying it is not being picked as a visible source on the questions that matter to your market.

One reading trap is worth naming for autumn 2026: nobody has a long baseline yet. Week-on-week comparisons drawn from a few weeks of data will produce swings that mean nothing. The honest unit of decision is the quarter, cross-read against real clicks and real inbound enquiries.

Finally, this report does not replace a look at the site itself. The report tells you that Google displayed your pages. It never tells you why Google picked them, or why it passed them over. Those causes live in the site: genuinely quotable content, structured data, and public files that answer engines can actually read. The report is a thermometer, not a diagnosis.