Google Search Console has traditionally helped website owners understand how their pages perform in organic search. You could track clicks, impressions, search queries, and average positions to identify opportunities and investigate traffic changes.
But as Google Search expands beyond conventional results, understanding your website’s visibility requires looking at more than traditional blue links.
Google introduced dedicated generative AI performance reports in Search Console in June 2026. The reports became available worldwide on August 31, 2026, giving eligible website owners a separate view of their visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google also provides a separate report for generative AI features in Discover.
For SEO professionals, this creates a new opportunity to understand which pages appear in Google’s AI-powered search experiences and how that visibility changes over time.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to find the Google Search Console AI performance report, interpret its data, identify pages receiving AI visibility, and use those findings to inform your SEO strategy.
What Is the Google Search Console AI Performance Report?
The Google Search Console AI performance report is a dedicated report that measures your website’s impressions in supported generative AI features within Google Search.
It covers two main experiences:
- AI Overviews: AI-generated summaries that appear within Google Search results.
- AI Mode: A conversational search experience that lets users explore questions and follow-up topics through AI-generated responses.
Google also provides a separate generative AI performance report for Discover, so its data should not be confused with the Search report.
The report helps you understand how often links to your website appear in supported AI search features, which pages receive impressions, and where those impressions originate.
Previously, website owners had limited dedicated reporting for this type of visibility. The new report gives SEO professionals a more focused way to monitor appearances in these experiences.
However, it is important to understand what the report measures. It does not provide a complete picture of how users interact with AI answers, nor does it reveal every prompt that led to a citation. Its value comes from combining its visibility data with the other information available in Search Console and your analytics platform.
How to Find the AI Performance Report in Search Console
To access the report, you need access to the relevant website property in Google Search Console.
Follow these steps:
- Open Google Search Console.
- Select the website property you want to analyze.
- Open the Performance section in the navigation.
- Look for the Generative AI performance report.
- Open the Search report to review impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The report may not appear for every property. Google says this can happen when a website has not received enough impressions in supported generative AI features. Your site’s Search generative AI inclusion settings can also affect eligibility.
If you cannot find the report, check the property’s inclusion settings and allow for the possibility that the website has insufficient reportable visibility. The absence of the report does not, by itself, prove that your pages are being excluded from AI search.
You can review the official Generative AI performance report documentation for the latest interface details and reporting limitations.
What Data Does the AI Performance Report Show?
The report focuses on impressions and provides several ways to break down the data.
1. Impressions
Impressions show how often links to your website were displayed to users within supported generative AI features.
This metric provides a useful starting point for monitoring visibility. If impressions increase over time, your pages are being shown more often within the report’s supported AI search experiences.
However, impressions do not automatically mean that users visited your website, read your content, or took an action. Treat them as a visibility signal rather than a direct measure of traffic or business results.
2. Pages
The Pages view identifies the URLs receiving impressions in AI search features.
This is one of the most useful parts of the report because it helps you understand which content is being surfaced.
For example, you might find that:
- A detailed educational guide receives consistent AI impressions.
- A newer article begins appearing in AI results after gaining organic visibility.
- Several pages in one topic area receive impressions while related pages receive very few.
These observations can help you identify content worth investigating further. They do not establish why Google selected a particular page, but they give you a practical starting point for reviewing its usefulness, accuracy, structure, and relationship to other pages on your website.
3. Countries
The Countries view groups impressions by the country where the search originated.
This can help businesses and publishers understand whether their AI search visibility aligns with their intended audience.
For example, a company targeting customers in the United States may want to compare its AI visibility across countries. A website serving multiple markets can use this information to identify geographic patterns that deserve further investigation.
Country-level impressions do not necessarily indicate where conversions or qualified visits originate. Compare the findings with your analytics and business goals before changing your targeting strategy.
4. Devices
The Devices view groups impressions by desktop, tablet, and mobile.
Device-level data can help you understand where your website appears in AI search experiences and whether visibility patterns differ between device types.
If your pages receive substantial mobile visibility, review their mobile experience, readability, navigation, and loading performance. These checks are worthwhile because users who visit your website should be able to access the information comfortably.
Do not assume that mobile impressions automatically mean mobile traffic has increased. The report measures visibility, not the full journey after a user sees a link.
5. Dates and Trends
The report’s chart helps you monitor impressions over time. You can examine trends using different date ranges and available time granularities.
Look for sustained changes rather than reacting to every short-term fluctuation.
A rise in impressions might indicate that your pages are appearing more frequently in AI search features. A decline could reflect changes in search behavior, the pages being surfaced, or the visibility of AI features themselves.
The report does not identify the cause of every change. Use it to find patterns, then investigate those patterns with other evidence.
Learn more about Google Search Console.
How to Analyze the AI Performance Report
Simply checking impressions is not enough. The real value comes from using the data to ask better questions about your content and search visibility.
Step 1: Establish a Baseline
Start by selecting a reasonable date range and recording your current AI impressions.
Review the overall trend and note which pages receive the most visibility. If your website has only recently started receiving reportable impressions, focus on collecting a baseline before drawing conclusions.
Avoid comparing periods with substantially different lengths or treating a small amount of data as a reliable long-term trend.
Step 2: Identify Pages Receiving the Most Impressions
Open the Pages view and examine the URLs with the highest impression counts.
For each important page, ask:
- Does the page serve a clear search intent?
- Is the information accurate and current?
- Does it provide useful explanations beyond generic summaries?
- Are its important claims supported by evidence where appropriate?
- Does it help readers understand the topic or complete a task?
Use these questions to evaluate the content, not to assume that a particular formatting technique caused the page to appear in AI results.
A page receiving many AI impressions is worth studying, but it is not automatically your best-performing page in terms of traffic, leads, or revenue.
Step 3: Review Pages With Low or Declining Visibility
Pages receiving few impressions may still be valuable. A new article, a highly specialized resource, or a page serving a small audience may have limited exposure without being poor content.
Before making changes, consider the page’s purpose, publication date, organic search performance, internal links, indexing status, and the demand for the topic.
If a page is declining, investigate whether its information is outdated, its search intent has changed, or another page on your site serves the same purpose more effectively.
Do not rewrite, merge, or delete pages solely because their AI impression counts are low.
Step 4: Compare AI Visibility With Traditional Search Performance
The dedicated AI report is most useful when viewed alongside the standard Search results Performance report.
For a page receiving AI impressions, review its conventional search clicks and impressions over the same period. Where relevant, also examine its queries, average position, and click-through rate in the standard report.
This comparison can reveal different patterns.
- AI impressions and organic clicks are both increasing: The page may be gaining visibility across multiple search experiences. Review the trend over time and check whether the additional visibility brings meaningful visits.
- AI impressions are increasing but clicks are flat: Your page is appearing more often in AI features, but that visibility has not produced a clear increase in traditional organic clicks. This is a reason to investigate, not proof that AI features are taking clicks away from your page.
- Organic clicks are falling while AI impressions are rising: Examine the dates, affected pages, and conventional search queries before attributing the decline to AI search. Changes in rankings, demand, seasonality, SERP layouts, or other factors may also contribute.
- Both AI impressions and organic clicks are falling: Investigate the wider search performance of the affected pages, including indexing, ranking changes, technical issues, and whether the content still satisfies its intended search purpose.
The goal is to understand what is happening before deciding what to change.
Step 5: Export Data for Further Analysis
Search Console allows you to export the report’s chart and table data.
Exporting can be useful when you want to compare reporting periods, maintain a record of important pages, or combine AI impression trends with other SEO data.
A simple spreadsheet can include:
- Page URL
- AI impressions for the selected period
- Previous-period impressions
- Change in impressions
- Traditional organic clicks
- Traditional organic impressions
- Average position
- Notes on relevant content or technical changes
Keep the reporting periods consistent. Also remember that the chart and table can show different totals because Google aggregates them differently. The newest data may be preliminary and can change as reporting is updated.
What the AI Performance Report Cannot Tell You
Understanding the report’s limitations is just as important as knowing how to use it.
It Does Not Reveal Every Search Prompt
The dedicated report groups data by pages, countries, devices, and dates. It does not provide a complete list of the exact prompts or questions that caused your website to appear in AI-generated responses.
You therefore cannot use it alone to identify every conversational query associated with your AI visibility.
Use traditional Search Console query data, customer questions, relevant keyword research, and manual analysis of search results to build a broader understanding of audience needs.
It Is Not a Complete AI Traffic Report
The dedicated Search report centers on impressions. It should not be treated as a complete report of clicks, sessions, conversions, or revenue from AI search.
Use your standard Search Console Performance report to analyze conventional organic clicks and CTR, and use an analytics platform to assess website sessions and meaningful actions where attribution is available.
Different reports measure different parts of the search journey. Combining them gives you a more useful view than relying on one metric.
It Does Not Explain Why a Page Was Selected
The report shows which URLs received impressions, but it does not tell you exactly why Google selected them.
A page may have useful information, clear structure, strong relevance, or other characteristics that make it suitable for a particular search. However, the report does not assign visibility to any single content technique or ranking factor.
Avoid making sweeping conclusions from a small set of URLs. Look for recurring patterns across your content and test improvements carefully.
It Does Not Cover Every AI Search Experience
The Search report covers supported generative AI features in Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. Discover has its own generative AI report, and experimental experiences in Search Labs are not included in the Search report.
It also does not measure your visibility across every third-party AI assistant or search platform. You need other methods to evaluate those channels.
A Note on Multimodal Search Reporting
Google expanded Search Console’s reporting in September 2026 to include a multimodal search type filter in the standard Search results Performance report and the Generative AI performance report.
Multimodal search includes searches that originate from visual interactions, such as Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome’s image-search feature.
This is relevant for websites that rely on product images, instructional visuals, diagrams, or other useful visual content.
If your property receives traffic from these searches, use the available filter to investigate the data. Review whether your images are relevant, accessible to search engines, accompanied by useful page context, and helpful to users.
However, do not assume that adding more images will automatically increase AI visibility. The report helps you monitor performance, while the quality and usefulness of the page remain important parts of your broader SEO work.
For the official announcement, see Google’s multimodal Search performance reporting update.
How to Use AI Visibility Data to Improve Your SEO Strategy
The most effective approach is to treat the AI performance report as another source of evidence, not as a replacement for your existing SEO workflow.
Start with the pages that receive meaningful impressions and connect those findings to your content goals.
If an important guide receives consistent AI visibility, make sure it remains accurate, useful, and well-maintained. If related pages cover the same topic, review their distinct purposes and internal links rather than combining them automatically.
If a page receives little AI visibility but performs well in conventional search, do not assume it needs an AI-specific rewrite. Its current search performance may already indicate that it satisfies a valuable audience need.
When reviewing content, focus on improvements that benefit readers:
- Answer the main question clearly.
- Explain complex concepts with specific examples.
- Support factual claims with reliable sources.
- Keep important information accurate and updated.
- Use descriptive headings and a logical page structure.
- Add original analysis or practical guidance where it genuinely helps.
- Link to relevant resources that help readers explore the topic further.
These are sound content practices regardless of whether a page appears in an AI-generated response.
You should also avoid creating pages solely to chase AI impressions. A larger number of similar articles does not guarantee greater visibility. Prioritize content that serves a distinct purpose and provides genuine value.
Final Thoughts
The Google Search Console AI performance report gives website owners a more focused way to monitor their visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It helps identify which pages receive impressions, where that visibility originates, and how it changes over time.
Its value, however, depends on how you interpret the data. Impressions are not clicks, and visibility does not automatically translate into business results. Use the report alongside traditional Search Console performance data, analytics, and careful content analysis.
Rather than changing your SEO strategy every time the numbers move, look for meaningful patterns, investigate the pages behind them, and make improvements that help users.
AI search is another part of the search landscape to understand. A measured approach will help you make better decisions without losing sight of the fundamentals that make a website useful.
