Google Search Console now shows how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Here is what that report counts, what it leaves out, and how a local service business can connect it to calls and booked work.
Brian Pierce
Coastal Solutions Media Team
The generative AI performance report is a Google Search Console report that shows how often links to your website appeared in Google's AI features, currently AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google introduced it in June 2026 and, according to its help documentation, made it available to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026.
For a local service business this is the first first-party view of something owners have been asking about since AI Overviews launched: when a homeowner asks Google a question and gets a generated answer, is my site one of the links in it? The report answers that question at the level of pages, countries, devices, and dates. It does not answer every question an owner will bring to it, and reading it well means knowing where it stops.
Google documents the report in its Search Console Help article on the generative AI performance report. Everything below is drawn from that page and Google's related documentation, applied to how a contractor, clinic, or other local business actually uses the data.
An impression is counted each time a link to your site is shown to a user inside a generative AI feature on Google Search. If two links from your site appear in the same AI Overview, the chart counts that as one impression for the property. When you filter to a single URL, the chart switches to counting by URL, so totals in the chart and the table can differ.
A few details are worth knowing before you read the numbers:
Search Labs experiments are not included, and Discover has its own separate report.
The report is narrow by design, and most misreadings come from expecting more from it.
| Question | Does this report answer it? | Where to look instead |
|---|---|---|
| How often did my pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode? | Yes | This report |
| Which of my pages appeared? | Yes | Pages tab |
| How many people clicked through from an AI answer? | No | Main Performance report, where AI clicks are combined with all other Web results |
| What did people search for? | No | Main Performance report queries, again not separated by feature |
| Was my business described accurately? | No | Manual checks of the answers themselves |
| Did an appearance turn into a call or booked job? | No | Your CRM and lead-source tracking |
That last row matters most. An impression means a link to your site was shown. It does not mean anyone read it, clicked it, or called you.
Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the standard Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, combined with clicks from every other kind of result. Google does not currently separate them by feature there, so you cannot isolate AI-driven clicks in that report alone.
Google's explanation of impressions, position, and clicks sets out the counting rules:
The practical consequence is that average position and click-through rate for a page can shift when it starts appearing inside AI Overviews, even if nothing about the page changed. Read those swings alongside the generative AI report before concluding a page is gaining or losing ground.
Google says the report usually does not appear because a site has not received enough impressions in generative AI features. It also will not show data if the site has been excluded from those features. For many small local businesses, an empty report simply reflects low search volume on the questions their pages answer, not a penalty or a technical fault.
If yours is empty, check the basics Google lists in its guidance on AI features and your website: important content available as text, crawling allowed in robots.txt and by your host or CDN, internal links that make pages discoverable, structured data that matches the visible page, and an accurate Google Business Profile. Google states there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in these features.
A short, consistent routine is more useful than checking daily. Once a month:
Treat month-to-month changes on small numbers with caution. A local business with a few hundred AI impressions will see noise that looks like a trend.
Google's report covers Google only. Other assistants have their own, uneven measurement:
Keep each source in its own column. Google impressions, Bing citations, and ChatGPT referral visits measure different things and should not be added together into a single "AI visibility" number.
For a service business, the question that matters is whether people found through AI answers become customers. No search report can tell you that. Your lead process can.
Most of the value comes from three habits:
CoastaFlow, our CRM, is built around this kind of source tracking, but the habit matters more than the tool.
A new report tends to attract new shortcuts. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features is direct about several of them:
What does help is the work that has always helped: pages that answer real customer questions clearly, accurate business information, and evidence from real customers. Our guide to generative engine optimization for service businesses covers that work in detail, and our Google Business Profile guide covers the local data AI answers draw on.
If you have not opened Search Console in a while, start by confirming you have verified access to your property, then check whether the generative AI report appears for your site. If it does, note your current numbers and top pages before making changes, so you can tell later what moved.
If you would rather have someone set up that baseline with you, our SEO, AEO, and GEO service and local SEO service both start with an evidence-led review of what Search Console, your Business Profile, and your lead data already show. You can also request a free growth audit.
Common questions
No. The generative AI performance report shows impressions: how often links to your site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device, and date. Clicks from those features are counted in the main Performance report under Web search, combined with clicks from other result types.
Google says the report usually does not appear when a site has not received enough impressions in generative AI features, or when the site has been excluded from those features. For a small local business, an empty report often reflects low search volume rather than a technical problem.
Google introduced the report in June 2026 to a subset of sites and, according to its help documentation, rolled it out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026. A site still needs enough impressions in AI features for data to appear.
Not in the generative AI report, which does not include queries. The main Performance report shows queries for all Web results combined, and AI Mode follow-up questions are counted as new queries, but Search Console does not label which queries produced an AI Overview appearance.
OpenAI says ChatGPT search adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it sends to websites, so those visits can be identified in analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Visits from assistants that do not pass a referrer appear as direct traffic, so recording lead source in your CRM is still necessary.
