Start with the Generative AI performance report. Google announced it on 3 June 2026 and says it had reached every site by 31 August 2026. It shows how often links to your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date.
It counts impressions only. It has no clicks and no query dimension, so read it next to the main Performance report, where AI features are counted inside the Web search type along with every other web result.
What Search Console shows about AI features
| Report or setting | What it shows | What it leaves out |
|---|---|---|
| Generative AI performance report (Search) | Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date | Clicks, queries, and Search Labs experiments |
| Generative AI performance report (Discover) | Impressions in Discover's generative AI features, by page, country and date | Clicks and queries |
| Performance report, Web search type | Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and position, AI features included | A split for AI features: none of its search appearance types covers them |
| Search generative AI setting | Whether your pages may appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features | Nothing to measure; it is a switch |
How AI features are counted
- Impressions. The new report counts each time a link to your site was shown in a generative AI feature. In the chart, two links from your site in the same feature count as one impression.
- Clicks. In the Performance report, clicking a link to an outside page in an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts as a click.
- Position. An AI Overview occupies a single position, and every link inside it gets that position. In AI Mode, position follows the usual rules, and a follow-up question counts as a new query.
- Pages. Data is assigned to the final URL after redirects, and mostly to the canonical URL.
- Time. Dates are in Pacific Time, and the newest data can be preliminary.
See which pages AI features show
- Open the Generative AI performance report for Search.
- Choose a date range.
- Open the Pages tab and export the table.
- Open the Performance report for Search results, keep the search type on Web, and set the same dates.
- Open its Pages tab and export that table too.
- Join the two files on the page URL and divide each page's AI impressions by its total impressions.
- Sort by that share, highest first.
The top of that list shows the pages where Google's AI features now supply most of your visibility. Before drawing conclusions, compare those pages' clicks with the same period a year earlier. Both tables are subject to Search Console's usual 1,000-row limit, so large sites should export by section.
Find the questions people bring to your pages
The generative AI report has no queries, but the Performance report does, and its regex filter can pull out the long, question-shaped searches that make good prompts to track.
- In the Performance report, open the Queries tab.
- Click Add filter, choose Queries, then Custom (regex).
- Paste one of the patterns below and click Apply.
For queries that start with a question word:
^(who|what|when|where|why|how|which|can|does|do|is|are|should)\s
For queries of eight words or more:
^(\S+\s+){7,}\S+$
Search Console uses RE2 syntax. A pattern matches anywhere in the query unless you anchor it with ^ or $, and matching ignores case unless you start the pattern with (?-i).
Google says AI Mode is particularly helpful for queries that need further exploration, reasoning or complex comparisons. The report cannot tell you which queries came through AI Mode, but these filters show you the longer questions people ask about your topic. On properties with a large volume of queries, Search Console Insights also groups the many phrasings of one question into query groups.
Check the Search generative AI setting
Since 31 August 2026, every property has a Search generative AI setting, under Settings, then Search generative AI.
- Include is the default, except for a property with a parent, which inherits. Your pages can appear as links in AI features and help ground their answers.
- Exclude keeps your links and content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features, so you get no impressions or traffic from them. Google says the choice is not used as a ranking signal for the rest of Search, and does not affect AI training, which Google-Extended controls.
- Inherit follows the setting of a parent property.
Google's guide to its generative AI features says a site must be included here to be eligible for those features at all. After a change, most content is excluded within one to two days, though some takes longer. The difference between this setting and robots.txt rules is covered in how to set up robots.txt for AI crawlers.
What Search Console cannot tell you
Search Console covers Google's own surfaces: Search, Discover and News. It says nothing about ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok or the Gemini app, and nothing about AI traffic that arrives from them, which GA4's AI Assistant channel handles.
Microsoft offers the closest equivalent for its own engines. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, shows how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner services, which pages, and a sample of the grounding queries behind the citations. In June 2026 Microsoft added intents, topics and a citation share measure, also in preview.
For the other engines you have to check the answers themselves. Cituna, built by the team behind this site, checks seven engines daily and includes a Search Console integration on every plan. Google's own guide adds a caution worth keeping for any tool: no third-party tool has access to Google's internal ranking or AI systems.
What to do first
- Open the Generative AI performance report and export the Pages table.
- Work out each page's share of impressions from AI features.
- Run the question filters on your queries and save the results.
- Confirm the Search generative AI setting is the one you intend.
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools to see Copilot citations.