The generative AI performance report is part of Google Search Console, a free Google service for website owners. Unlike in-house measurements with selected test questions, it provides first-party figures: they are based on the answers people were actually shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode. A link that supports a statement in the answer is an AI citation; the report, however, counts how often links to the website were shown, not the citations themselves.

Google announced the report on June 3, 2026, together with a new setting that lets website owners exclude their content from these AI features. Both first went to a subset of website owners in the UK; since August 31, 2026, they have been available to all websites worldwide. Google Discover, the part of Google Search that suggests content based on people’s interests, has a separate report for its AI features.

What the report shows

The report counts impressions. According to Google, an impression means that a link to the website was shown to a person in AI Overviews or AI Mode. That is not a click: the report doesn’t record whether anyone clicked the link. As of October 2026, impressions are its only metric; Google has said it will add more over time.

Impressions can be broken down by four dimensions:

  • Pages: which pages of the website were linked. The report records the address after any redirects, usually the canonical URL—the address Google treats as the main version of a page that can be reached under several addresses.
  • Countries: the country the request came from.
  • Devices: whether the answer appeared on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
  • Dates: the trend by day, week, or month.

A filter also separates questions typed as text (“Web: text-based”) from questions that included an image, for example a photo taken with Google Lens (“Web: multimodal”). The chart and table data can be exported, for example for a monthly report.

When counting, Google combines links to the same site: if an AI answer shows two links to the same website, the site’s total counts only one impression. Broken down by page, however, each linked page gets its own. For example, if an answer in AI Mode links to both a company’s pricing page and one of its guides, the chart shows one impression and the table by page shows two. That is why the totals in the table and the chart can differ.

What the report doesn’t show

As of October 2026, the report contains no questions, so which prompts a link appeared for remains unknown. It doesn’t show clicks or answer text either. Whether an answer names a brand without linking to it—a mention—therefore can’t be seen in the report, and neither can brand accuracy, that is, whether the information about a brand is correct. Nor does it report AI Overviews and AI Mode separately.

Its coverage has limits too. According to Google, experiments in Search Labs, Google’s program for testing new features, are not included, and Google doesn’t list the Gemini app among the features covered. How ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity use a website is outside the report’s scope anyway. Microsoft’s counterpart is the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, which counts how often a website’s pages were cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot and other AI features.

Access and interpretation of the figures

To see the report, the website must be added to Search Console as a property—a website or section of a website that Search Console analyzes—and ownership must be verified, for example with a record at the domain provider (a DNS record) or a file on the web server. If someone else already manages Search Console, such as an agency, a verified owner can give you access.

A regular look, for example once a month, shows how impressions develop and which pages appear most often as links in Google’s AI answers. It is revealing to compare them with the pages that matter most to your business. If important product or service pages don’t appear at all, it’s worth checking whether Google may link to them: whether they are in Google’s web index and not excluded by nosnippet or by the “Search generative AI” setting in Search Console. The nosnippet directive, which can sit in a page’s HTML or in the server’s response, prevents the page’s content from being used as direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. An accidental exclusion would be an unintended AI answer opt-out. Google itself recommends the report for estimating how changing this setting might affect traffic to a website.

Impressions only occur when someone asks a question for which Google shows an AI answer. The figures therefore also rise and fall with how often people ask about a website’s topics, for example by season. The report complements GEO monitoring, which works with a fixed set of questions: monitoring shows whether and how AI systems name a brand and which competitors appear, while the report shows how often links to the website were shown in Google’s AI answers.