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You Can Finally See How Many AI Impressions Your Website Gets

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TL;DR

Since 31 August, Google Search Console has had separate AI reports for Search and Discover. They show how often links to your site appear in Google’s AI features, but not clicks or visits. You can opt out of AI visibility, but that would also remove these impressions and visits.

You can now see how many AI impressions your website gets in Google Search Console. Google rolled out the new reports worldwide on 31 August 2026. They show how often links to your website appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Google Discover. Search and Discover have separate reports. This is interesting for B2B marketing managers, but you still cannot see how many clicks or enquiries those impressions generate. Traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI search services is not included. Google explains the rollout in its announcement of the AI performance reports.

Impressions

You can find the generative AI reports under Performance. They include:

  • Impressions: how often links to your website were shown.
  • Pages: which URLs appeared in AI features.
  • Countries: where the searches came from.
  • Devices: desktop, tablet or mobile, in the Search report only.
  • Dates: by hour, day, week or month, depending on the view selected.

An impression means a link to your website was shown. It does not count every time an AI model mentions your company name or uses your text. Google explains the counting method in its Search report documentation.

I find it frustrating that these separate AI reports still do not show clicks. You therefore cannot tell how many visitors those impressions bring, let alone how many enquiries or sales. You depend on what Google chooses to share. Impressions can show which pages appear more often and whether that coincides with new or updated content. A rise after publication does not prove that the publication caused it.

The opt-out

Under Settings > Search generative AI, you can tell Google whether it may use your links and content in these AI features. This is allowed by default. A child property may inherit the setting of its parent property. If you opt out, your links and content will no longer appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode or the generative AI features in Discover. You will no longer get impressions or traffic through those features either. It may take a few days for the change to take effect.

Google says this choice does not affect ranking or inclusion in other Search features. It is therefore no guarantee that you will keep the same position. The setting also does not control AI model training. For that, Google points to Google-Extended. The consequences are described in Google’s opt-out documentation.

Getting started

  • Check whether the AI reports are available in your Search Console. A report may be absent if there are too few impressions.
  • Compare the same pages across equal time periods. Note when you publish or update content so you can investigate changes.
  • Create content you are proud of. Make sure it is relevant and that Google can crawl and index your pages. Also read my article on Google’s guidelines for AI search optimisation.

This translation was made by AI.