What Search Console's AI Report Actually Counts

"Search Console has an AI report now, so we can finally see our AI visibility." That sentence has been doing the rounds in marketing meetings since the start of September, and it is half right in a way that will cause trouble. Search Console can now tell you something specific about how Google's own AI features show your site. It cannot tell you your AI visibility, because that phrase covers several products Google does not own, and one thing no impression count can capture: what the answer actually says.

The report is genuinely useful, it costs nothing, and it is now available to every site. Which is precisely why it is worth taking apart before it becomes the number everyone quotes.

What Google shipped, and when

Google announced its Search generative AI performance reports on 3 June 2026, initially for a subset of sites. A note added to that announcement records that, as of 31 August, they have been rolled out to all websites worldwide. There are two views, one for Search and one for Discover.

The Search view is the one most B2B sites will care about. Google's help documentation for the report lists AI Overviews and AI Mode as the features covered, says the list will be updated over time, and excludes experiments in Search Labs. What you get is this:

• Impressions: how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature.
• Pages: grouped by the final URL the feature linked to, after any redirects.
• Countries: grouped by where the search originated.
• Devices: desktop, tablet or mobile.
• Dates, with the most recent figures marked as preliminary until they settle.

That is the whole list. The documentation describes no click metric for this view and no query dimension. Google's announcement says it intends to add further metrics over time, which is a statement of intent rather than a feature, and ought to be read as one.

"It tells us how often we appear in AI answers"

Partly. It tells you how often a link to your site was shown inside AI Overviews or AI Mode. Two details narrow that considerably.

The first is that counting is done by property. If two links to the same site appear in one AI feature, Google counts a single impression. A site whose pages are cited three times in the same AI Mode response registers once.

The second matters more. The report counts links, not mentions. An AI Overview can describe your category, name your company and summarise your product range, and if it does not link to your site there is nothing to count. The reverse also happens: a link to one of your pages can sit among the sources of an answer whose text recommends somebody else. Both are real events, and the impression figure cannot tell them apart.

"Now we know which questions bring us up"

Not from this view. With no query dimension documented, you learn which pages were shown, in which countries and on which devices, but not in response to what. For a company selling a narrow technical product the question is most of the information. A rise in impressions on a product page might come from engineers comparing specifications or from students writing coursework, and the report will not say which.

The main Performance report does carry queries, and Google's documentation says that appearances in AI features are included there, within the Web search type, as they were before the dedicated view existed. Its position figure needs handling with care, though. Google's help page on the Performance report states that an AI Overview occupies a single position in the results and that every link inside it is assigned that same position. Being the first source in an Overview and being the fifth produce an identical number.

"So this is our AI visibility score"

This is where the belief breaks outright.

The report covers Google's generative features in Search and Discover. It does not see ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, none of which are Google products, and the Gemini app is not among the surfaces its documentation lists. A buyer who asks a standalone assistant for a shortlist of suppliers leaves no trace in Search Console whatsoever.

Nor does the report contain the answer. Search Console records that a link was shown. It does not record the sentence around the link, whether that sentence was accurate, whether it presented your product as the specialist choice or as an afterthought, or which competitors were named alongside you or in your place. It only ever reports on your own property, so the other names in the same Overview are invisible to it by design.

For an exporter the gap widens by language. The country dimension tells you where a search came from. It does not tell you what the AI Overview said in Italian as opposed to German, or whether the German version named a domestic rival and left you out. Two markets with similar impression counts can be reading quite different paragraphs.

None of this is a defect. The report was built to show site owners how Google's features display their pages, and it does that competently. The mistake lies in asking it to be something else.

Where the two measurements meet, and where they do not

At this point a vendor would normally announce that its product fills every gap. Ours does not, and it would be a little rich to take apart one overstatement only to commit another.

PSentry measures what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity say when asked the questions your buyers ask, in each language and market you sell in: whether you are named, how you are described, which sources are cited and who is named instead of you. It does so through the assistants' APIs, twice a month. It does not monitor AI Overviews, AI Mode or any other AI surface inside Google Search, and it has no view of your Search Console data. Google's AI features are, for PSentry, simply out of sight.

The sensible arrangement, then, is two readings kept side by side, each covering ground the other cannot reach:

• Search Console: Google's AI features, counted as link impressions on your own pages, by page, country and device, free and first-party.
• An assistant-level measurement: the text of answers in the standalone assistants, per language, including the competitors that appear where you do not, with no view of Google's results page.

A site that sees healthy AI impressions in Search Console and absence from the German ChatGPT answer does not have contradictory data. It has two different facts about two different systems, and would do well not to average them.

The questions this report keeps prompting

Does the new view replace the Performance report for AI traffic?

No. Google says data from generative AI features continues to be included in the overall Performance report. The new view isolates it. If you have been comparing total impressions month on month, those totals already contained appearances in AI features before the dedicated view arrived.

Why are my AI impressions lower than I expected?

Partly the counting rule: several links to your site in one AI feature make a single impression. Partly the fact that only links count, so a mention of your company without a link registers nothing. And the most recent days are preliminary, shown as a dotted line, and can still move.

Can I see which competitors appeared in the same AI Overview?

No. Search Console reports on your own property only. It says nothing about which other sites were linked, or which companies were named in the text.

Is there a way to keep a site out of these features?

There is. Google has rolled out a Search generative AI control in Search Console, available to all sites since 31 August, which covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover; Google states it is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal elsewhere in Search. Whether a B2B site ought to use it is a separate question, and deserves a piece of its own.