Written by: Khalid SEO | AI Search + SEO Specialist in Malaysia
If you’ve been guessing whether your content ever makes it into an AI Overview, that guessing game just got shorter. On June 3, 2026, Google added a new section to Search Console called the Search Generative AI performance report. It lives inside your existing Performance report, and it shows how often your pages are turning up inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the AI features inside Discover.
For the past two years this has been the biggest blind spot in SEO. You could watch AI Overviews take up more and more space at the top of the results page. You could feel your click-through rate softening. But there was no direct way to confirm whether your own pages were actually part of the answer, or just getting skipped over entirely. We wrote about that exact frustration in why your website isn’t showing up in AI search, and this update is the first real crack in that wall.
So here’s what the report actually shows, what it still hides, and what I’d do with it if it were live on my account right now.
What the report shows
The new view breaks your AI visibility down a few ways:
- Impressions: how often URLs from your site showed up inside an AI-generated answer
- Pages: which specific URLs are appearing
- Countries: where that visibility is happening
- Devices: desktop vs mobile
- Date: hourly up to monthly
It’s a solid set of filters if you want to know whether your AI visibility is growing, shrinking, or piling up on a handful of pages you didn’t expect.
One thing worth being upfront about: this isn’t new data appearing out of thin air. Google confirmed that AI impressions were always counted inside your overall Performance report totals. This update just splits them out into their own view. Your aggregate numbers in Search Console don’t change because of this. You’re just getting a clearer lens on a slice of data that used to be blended into everything else.
Report data starts from May 18, 2026. There’s no history before that, so if you were hoping to look back at last year’s AI visibility, it’s not there.
What it doesn’t show
This is the part most of the coverage glosses over, and it’s the part that actually matters.
The report only shows impressions. No clicks, no click-through rate, no query-level detail yet. So you can confirm you showed up, but you can’t yet tell how much of that visibility turned into an actual visit. Google has said more metrics are coming, but there’s no timeline for that.
There’s a second, quieter gap. An impression here means your URL appeared somewhere inside an AI-generated response. It does not confirm you were cited as a visible, clickable source. Your content can shape what the AI says without your site ever showing up as a link the reader can tap. The report doesn’t tell those two situations apart, which means a rising impression count doesn’t automatically mean rising brand visibility the way you’d want it to. This lines up with something we’ve covered before around why AI Overviews sometimes cite listicles and recommend your competitors instead of you: showing up in the response and getting credit for it are two different things.
And one more limit worth keeping in mind: this only measures Google’s own AI features. It says nothing about how your content is being used inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. If you want the fuller picture, you’ll need to look at those separately, something we broke down in Google AI Overviews brand mentions vs ChatGPT.
Who can actually see this right now
Right now, the report is rolling out to a subset of website owners based in the UK, with the timing tied in part to pressure from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. Google has said a global rollout is planned but hasn’t given a date.
So if you check your Search Console today and don’t see a “Generative AI” section under Performance, it usually means one of three things: your property isn’t in the test group yet, your site hasn’t had enough AI impressions to populate anything, or you’ve used the new opt-out control below. There’s no application form or opt-in process to speed this up. Access just shows up automatically once your property qualifies.
The other change buried in the same announcement
Alongside the reporting feature, Google also added a toggle letting site owners block their content from appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s AI features entirely.
If you opt out, two things happen. You stop getting any impressions or traffic from those AI surfaces, and it does not touch your rankings in standard organic search. Those are the only two confirmed effects. It’s a genuinely separate control from your regular search visibility, not some hidden ranking penalty in disguise.
Should you flip it? For most businesses, no. Opting out means stepping away from one of the fastest-growing places people are getting answers, right as it’s finally becoming measurable. Unless you have a specific reason to keep your content out of AI answers, staying visible and working to actually get cited is the stronger long-term move. Which is really the same conclusion we came to in how to get cited in AI Overviews: the goal isn’t to hide from AI, it’s to become the source it trusts enough to quote.
What to do about it, even before you have access
You don’t need this report live on your property to start preparing for it. A few things worth doing now:
Audit the pages that already rank well in classic search but probably aren’t showing up in AI answers. These gaps usually come down to how the content is structured, not backlinks or domain age. If a page answers a question in a roundabout way, buried three paragraphs down, it’s harder for an AI system to lift a clean answer out of it. We’ve laid out a more detailed process for this in how to rank in AI search results.
Check your schema markup. Structured data helps search systems understand what your content actually is and how it connects to other topics. If it’s missing or outdated, that’s worth fixing regardless of whether this specific report ever reaches your dashboard. This ties directly into the entity-based approach we covered in entity-based SEO and Google’s LLM patent.
Write in a way that gives a direct answer early. Content that leads with a clear answer to the reader’s actual question tends to be easier for AI systems to pull out and quote. That’s not a trick, it’s just clarity, and it happens to help human readers and AI Overviews at the same time.
Look past Google. Since Search Console only covers Google’s own AI features, if you want a fuller read on your AI search visibility, you’ll want to track things across other platforms too. We talk through how to actually do that in how to track your AI Overviews visibility.
The bottom line
This is the first time Google has handed site owners a direct, first-party window into AI Overviews and AI Mode visibility, instead of leaving everyone to guess or rely on third-party tools. That’s genuinely useful. But it’s still early. Impressions without clicks tell you that you showed up, not that you’re winning. And a rollout limited to a subset of UK properties means most businesses, including a lot of the ones we work with in Malaysia, can’t check this yet.
The right move isn’t to sit around waiting for the report to appear. It’s to keep improving your AI visibility now, so that whenever this data does land in your account, the numbers actually reflect the work you’ve already put in.
If you want a second set of eyes on whether your content is structured in a way that gives you a real shot at showing up in AI Overviews, that’s exactly the kind of audit we do at Khalid SEO. Reach out and we’ll walk through what your site looks like from an AI search perspective, dashboard access or not.