The new Search Console report tells you whether AI is citing you (but not everything)

As of a few days ago, the "Generative AI" report in Search Console is no longer limited to a select few: it is visible on every verified property, worldwide. For the first time you can see, with actual data, whether and how often your pages are shown inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative results in Discover. That's good news, but it needs careful reading: the report shows less than it appears to, and understanding what's missing matters as much as understanding what's there.

What has actually changed

Google introduced this report in June 2026, but gradually: first a limited test, then a progressive rollout. In the middle weeks of August it reached the global public — every verified property in Search Console, no longer just a selected group. You'll find it under Performance → Generative AI, as a separate tab from the classic clicks and impressions report.

The logic is simple: until now, impressions generated inside AI answers were mixed in with the normal "organic" numbers, with no way to isolate them. Now they have a dedicated lens. Google counts an impression every time one of your pages is loaded and visually displayed inside a generated answer block — it isn't enough for the content to be "in the pool", it has to have actually appeared in the answer.

Why is it worth looking at anyway? Because until now, the only way to find out whether an AI was citing you was to go and check by hand: ask ChatGPT or Google some questions, hope you landed in the right sample, and hope the result was representative. Structured data, even partial, changes things: you can finally track a trend over time instead of relying on sporadic, subjective spot checks.

What you see (and what you don't)

The report filters by date, country, device and page: you can work out which URLs on your site are being picked up by AI, when, and where in the world those impressions come from. Useful, but with three gaps you'd better know about before drawing conclusions:

• No click data. You can see that a page was cited, not whether that citation brought anyone to your site. For now the lens stops at visibility and doesn't reach traffic.
• No queries or prompts. You will never know the exact questions a user asked to make your page appear. Google keeps them anonymous, partly to stop people optimising for individual phrasings rather than real topics.
• No "position". The idea of first, second or tenth result doesn't apply: inside a generated answer there is no fixed order to chase, and AI Overviews layouts change constantly through A/B tests on Google's side.

In practice: it's a visibility counter, not yet an attribution tool. Google itself, when presenting the report, said it would keep "working with site owners to understand which metrics to add over time" — read that as confirmation that this is a first version, not the finished product.

Two technical details worth knowing before you use it: the table is capped at a thousand rows per export, and the data is processed on Pacific time, not Italian time — if you compare the numbers with other Search Console reports and the totals don't match to the last unit, that's almost always the reason, not an error. There is also a new control, for those who would rather stay out of it altogether: a toggle to explicitly exclude your content from generative answers, separate from the classic crawler block in robots.txt.

What to do with it, in practice

Even with these limits, the report is worth looking at with a minimum of method:

• First of all, check whether you appear at all. If the report has been at zero for weeks across every page, the problem isn't "optimising for AI": most likely you're still missing the SEO basics that get you into the index AI draws its answers from.
• Look at which pages get cited, not which ones you'd like to see. Often it isn't the product or service pages that show up, but informational content — guides, FAQs, in-depth articles. That's a clue about what to write more of, not a coincidence.
• Cross-check the countries. If you have a multilingual site or serve several markets, the country filter tells you where AI is already finding you and where you're invisible — useful for deciding where to invest first.
• Don't chase the number on its own. Without linked clicks, a rising impression count isn't a business result yet. Treat it as a directional indicator, not as a KPI to build a report for the boss around.
• Check it monthly, not daily. AI numbers move in jumps — a new feature launch on Google's side, an A/B test on layouts, and the count changes without you having touched anything. A month-on-month comparison tells you more than ten checks in a week.

On the side: the August anti-spam update

In the same few days, on 18 August, Google officially released the August 2026 spam update, published on its status dashboard as applied "globally and in all languages", with a rollout expected to take a few days. It's the third anti-spam update of 2026, after those in March and June. It's worth distinguishing it from a proper core update: a core update rethinks how Google weighs quality in general, whereas a spam update targets specific practices already banned by the guidelines — bought links, scraped content, cloaking and the like. If your site plays fair, in theory it has nothing to do with you. "In theory" because a bit of collateral damage, on sites that did nothing wrong, happens anyway: if you've seen an unusual drop in recent days, before you panic check whether it coincides with these dates, and look in Search Console for manual actions — usually there are none, and it's just noise that settles on its own within a few days.

In short

The new report doesn't yet tell you whether AI citations bring you customers, but it finally tells you whether you exist in the eyes of AI. It's the first step before the next one, not a finish line: use it to find out where you're invisible, not to build a league table.

Want to know whether your pages have the basics to appear in AI answers, even before you look at the report? Analyse your site with the free tool, or read how we work on SEO for generative AI. Specific questions? The most common answers are in the FAQ, or write to me directly.