Google finished rolling out its generative AI performance reports to every Search Console property on 31 August 2026. The report tells you how often your pages appeared inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Discover. It does not tell you how many clicks those appearances produced, and it does not tell you which queries produced them. That gap is the whole story, and it is worth understanding before you build a report around the numbers.
What Google actually shipped
The note Google added to its own Search Central announcement is short:
As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide.
Barry Schwartz confirmed the same wording on the help document for the opt-out control at Search Engine Roundtable, and Matt G. Southern covered the rollout at Search Engine Journal on the same day. Search Engine Land ran its own piece within the hour. When three publications that rarely agree on emphasis all lead with the same sentence, the thing is real.
The report sits as an expandable tab under the main performance report. It carries five dimensions:
- Impressions — how often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover.
- Pages — which URLs appeared.
- Countries — visibility broken out by country.
- Devices — available for Search results only.
- Dates — hourly, daily, weekly and monthly granularity.
There is no click data and no query data. If your site has not accumulated enough AI impressions, Google has said you may not see a report at all, so an empty tab is not necessarily a fault.
What is the opt-out control, and should anyone use it?
Alongside the report, Google shipped a property-level setting called the Search generative AI control. Switching it on excludes your links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover.
Two things about it are worth stating plainly. Google says the setting is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search, and it has no bearing on AI training, which is governed separately by Google-Extended. And a site that opts out receives no traffic and no impressions from those surfaces at all. It is not a dial. It is a switch, and it is currently all or nothing across the whole property.
For most businesses the answer is straightforward: leave it alone and read the report. The publishers with a genuine case for opting out know who they are, and even they are probably better served waiting. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has given Google until March 2027 to introduce page-level controls, which is the version of this setting that would actually be useful to somebody who wants their guides out of AI answers but their product pages in.
Why the missing click data matters more than it looks
An impression in an AI Overview is not the same kind of event as an impression on a results page, and the difference is not academic. On a results page an impression is a chance to be clicked. Inside a generated answer, the impression may be the entire transaction: the reader gets what they came for and never arrives. That shift is large enough that we have given it a post of its own.
So a rising impression line in the new report is genuinely ambiguous. It might mean your content is becoming the source AI systems reach for, which is good. It might mean your content is being consumed in place of a visit, which is a different situation with different economics. Without clicks you cannot separate the two, and any report that treats the impression count as a performance number is quietly assuming an answer it does not have.
The CMA is expecting click-through data from Google as part of the same compliance timetable, and Google will have to report on its progress every six months during the first year. Until that lands, treat the AI impression count as a presence metric. It answers the question “does this system know about us.” It does not answer “is this system sending us anything.”
What is a grounding query, and why should you care?
The most useful piece of work published the same week came from a different direction. Dr Peter J. Meyers at Moz collected 5,333 grounding queries from Google Gemini across 1,000 subtopics and published the whole dataset. Grounding queries are the searches a model runs on its own behalf to fill the gap between its training data and the present day.
Grounding queries are searches run by machines, for machines to make up for the inherent limitations of LLMs.
The shape of them is instructive. They averaged 6.56 words and ranged from three to seventeen, with over half landing at six or seven words. A third of them mentioned a year, sometimes two years in sequence, which is the model reaching past its own training cut-off. And a good number of them are not phrasings a person would ever type. Meyers gives examples like semiconductor fabrication front end back end steps lithography deposition etching doping, and one seventeen-word query that uses Boolean OR operators.
His conclusion is the part worth pinning to the wall:
Grounding is Google running searches for itself, to surface content it might otherwise miss.
That reframes what the Search Console report is counting. The impressions in that tab were, in many cases, earned against searches no human ran, phrased in a way no keyword tool would surface. Which is a reasonable explanation for why your AI impressions and your organic impressions do not move together, and why a keyword list built entirely from human search volume is an incomplete map of the surface.
One caveat from the same research, since it affects anyone evaluating tools: grounding queries retrieved through the Gemini API cost roughly $14 per 1,000 queries as of August 2026, and that is separate from token costs. If a third-party AI visibility tool is running on your own API key, the bill is worth watching.
What to do with the report this month
Take a baseline now, because the history does not backfill. Export impressions by page and by country before the numbers get away from you. The report has hourly granularity, and a month from now the question you will want to answer is “what changed”, which needs a before.
Compare the AI page list against your organic page list. The pages that appear in AI features are frequently not the pages that earn organic clicks, and the gap is usually explained by how legible the page is to a machine rather than by how well it ranks. Where the two lists diverge, you are looking at content that machines find quotable and humans do not find findable, or the reverse. Both are actionable and neither shows up in a blended total.
Do not report AI impressions as traffic. Put them in their own section with a sentence explaining what they are. The temptation to fold a large new number into a growth chart is real, and it will cost you credibility the first time somebody asks what it converted.
Keep reporting keyword by keyword. The AI report has no query dimension, so it cannot replace query-level analysis. It sits alongside it. We report SEO performance as counts of distinct keywords per position band rather than as site-level averages, and nothing in this release changes that. It adds one more column to the same picture.
Frequently asked questions
Is the AI performance report available on every site now?
Google says it rolled out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026, though its own help pages still note the rollout is in progress, and sites without enough AI impressions may not see a report. If your tab is missing, waiting is usually the right response.
Does opting out of AI features hurt normal rankings?
Google states the control is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search. Opting out does remove you from AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover entirely, so you lose those impressions and any traffic they carry.
Does the opt-out stop Google training on my content?
No. Training is governed by the separate Google-Extended control. The Search generative AI control only affects appearance in the AI features inside Search and Discover.
Will Google add click data?
The CMA is expecting it, and Google must report on compliance every six months during the first year. Nothing in the 31 August update mentioned click reporting, so there is no date to plan around yet.
When do page-level controls arrive?
The CMA timeline gives Google until March 2027 to introduce controls at page level rather than the current property level.
The short version
Google now shows you where your pages surface inside AI answers, everywhere, for free. It shows you presence and nothing else. Take the baseline, keep it in its own column, and resist the urge to call an impression a result until Google gives you the number that would make that true.
