AI SEARCH VISIBILITY
G oogle gave marketing teams a number they have wanted for two years. On June 3, 2026, Search Console started showing a dedicated report for how often your pages show up inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative features now running inside Discover. The report sits alongside the classic performance report, not buried inside it, so you can finally see the AI slice of your visibility instead of guessing at it from a traffic dip.
The new view covers five dimensions: impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, with data available down to the hour. Google built it as a standalone section under Performance, with separate tabs for Search and Discover. Data starts on May 18, 2026. There is no historical backfill, so you are building a baseline from scratch, not reopening an old file.
The report tells you where, not why
Impressions and pages tell you which URLs are getting surfaced inside AI features. Countries and devices tell you where that visibility concentrates. What the report does not include, as of the June launch, is clicks, click-through rate, or the queries that triggered the appearance. You will know that a page showed up 4,000 times inside AI surfaces. You will not know what anyone asked to get there.
Google paired the report with an opt-out control. Under Settings, site owners can exclude their content from Search generative AI features without touching organic rankings elsewhere. That is a real choice publishers did not have before, and it is worth a conversation with your SEO lead about whether AI surface visibility is driving qualified traffic or just serving as a free answer engine for your competitors' prospects.
Rollout is uneven right now
Access started with a subset of UK-based properties before expanding. If you do not see the report in your Search Console account yet, that is expected, not a configuration problem on your end. Google has said global access is coming without committing to a date.
For anyone doing analyst relations or content strategy work around AI-powered search, this is the first first-party confirmation that Google sees the AI Overview and AI Mode surfaces as measurable, reportable inventory rather than a black box you infer from Google Analytics referral patterns.
WHAT TO DO MONDAY
Check whether your property has access to the report yet. If it does, export a baseline now while the data set is small enough to read by hand, since the API does not expose it.
Set expectations with your team before the impressions number lands in a leadership deck. Impressions without clicks or query data is a visibility signal, not a performance metric, and treating it as one will get your report challenged in the next meeting.
WORKS CITED
"Introducing Search Generative AI Performance Reports in Search Console." Google Search Central Blog, Google, 3 June 2026, developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports.