Google today launched dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports in Google Search Console, creating a standalone view of how websites appear within AI-powered features - a capability the search industry has been waiting for since AI Overviews began displacing traditional search results at scale in 2024.

The announcement was published on June 3, 2026, on the Google Search Central Blog. According to Google, the new reports cover two distinct surfaces: generative AI features within Search - which include AI Overviews and AI Mode - and generative AI features within Discover. The authors of the announcement are Hillel Maoz, Search Ecosystem Engineering Manager, and Moshe Samet, Product Manager Lead for Search Console.

What the new reports show

The reports expose five categories of data. Impressions count how often URLs from a site appeared inside generative AI features across both Search and Discover. The Pages dimension allows site owners to identify which specific URLs appeared within AI features - a breakdown unavailable anywhere else in the platform. Countries provide visibility breakdowns by geography, so publishers can understand whether their AI-feature exposure skews toward particular markets. Devices show what hardware people use when encountering a site inside AI Search results; this dimension is listed as available for Search results only, not Discover. Finally, Dates allow performance monitoring over time with four levels of granularity: hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.

That date granularity is notable. Search Console added weekly and monthly aggregation to its main performance report only in December 2025, responding to years of user feedback that daily breakdowns made it hard to detect longer-term trends. The new generative AI reports carry that same range of time intervals from day one.

A phased rollout, not a universal launch

Google is not making these reports immediately available to all Search Console users. According to the announcement, the company is "rolling these reports out to a subset of websites, allowing us to thoroughly test them and receive feedback before making them widely available." No timeline for broader availability was given.

This staged approach is consistent with how Google has introduced other recent Search Console features. The 24-hour performance data view launched in December 2024 also deployed gradually. Moshe Samet - who co-authored today's announcement - was also the product manager who announced that earlier update.

The data relationship with the existing performance report

One detail that publishers need to understand: the new reports do not create a separate data silo. According to Google, generative AI impression data "is included in the overall performance report, where it will continue to be tracked to give site owners an overview of the overall visibility of their site in Google Search." What is being introduced is "a separate view dedicated to visibility from generative AI features" - a segmented display of data already flowing into the aggregate totals.

This matters because for the past year, AI feature data has been folded into combined Web Search metrics in ways that made isolation nearly impossible. When Google confirmed on June 17, 2025 that AI Mode clicks, impressions, and position data count toward Search Console performance report totals, it added them to existing Web Search figures rather than giving them a separate bucket. Industry analyst Glenn Gabe called out the consequence at the time, noting that the 10-blue links, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and AI Mode were all grouped together under a single reporting category. Today's update starts to address that problem, at least for impressions on AI surfaces.

Background: a long-running measurement gap

The inability to measure AI feature visibility separately has been a persistent frustration for the marketing and publishing industries. AI Overviews launched in the United States in May 2024 and quickly became a common presence in search results, but publishers could not see how often their content was surfacing inside those features - only that overall impressions and clicks were moving.

Research from multiple sources documented meaningful click-through rate declines once AI Overviews appeared for a query. A study tracked on PPC Land analyzed 3,119 informational queries across 25.1 million organic impressions and found a 61% reduction in organic click-through rates and a 68% drop in paid traffic for queries where AI Overviews eventually appeared.

Separate from that, zero-click searches on Google climbed from 56% to nearly 69% after AI Overviews launched in May 2024, according to Similarweb research published in July 2025. Publishers were seeing impressions without corresponding clicks - but had no way to tell how much of that divergence was attributable to AI features specifically.

The situation worsened in September 2025, when a false claim circulated online that Google had already added a Search Appearance filter for AI Overviews to Search Console's Performance report. Google's senior search analyst John Mueller confirmed the claim was fabricated - no such filter existed. The incident underscored the demand for exactly the kind of feature that Google is now introducing.

How this connects to the broader AI Mode rollout

The timing of today's announcement lands as AI Mode - Google's most expansive AI search product to date - has been scaling rapidly. Launched experimentally in March 2025 for Google One AI Premium subscribers, AI Mode opened to all US users in May 2025, then expanded to Google Workspace accounts in July 2025. By the time of Google I/O in May 2026, the company reported AI Mode had surpassed one billion monthly users.

Queries in AI Mode are structurally different from conventional searches. Google published data in March 2026 indicating that AI Mode queries average three times the length of traditional searches. Answers draw on multiple sources simultaneously through what Google describes as a "query fan-out" technique. That makes impression attribution more complex - a single user query can surface content from multiple URLs in a single composite response.

The new generative AI reports in Search Console surface impression data for exactly these interactions. Whether they will also capture click data - which would be necessary to calculate meaningful click-through rates for AI features - is not stated in today's announcement. The documentation notes impressions and pages as core metrics; clicks are not mentioned explicitly in the five data categories described.

Discover gets its own generative AI report too

One aspect of today's announcement that has received less attention in early coverage is the inclusion of a dedicated generative AI report for Discover. Google Discover, the algorithmically curated content feed on Android and in the Google app, has been incorporating generative AI features of its own - and those now have separate tracking within Search Console.

PPC Land reported in December 2025 that Discover is increasingly surfacing AI-generated content and YouTube videos rather than publisher articles, a shift that several analytics firms documented through declining Discover traffic across their client portfolios. A dedicated report for generative AI impressions in Discover gives publishers their first structured view of how that surface is handling their content in an AI context.

A technical note on position methodology

The new reports track impressions - how often a URL appeared in a generative AI feature - but the question of how position is calculated for AI features remains complicated. AI Overviews historically assigned position one to all URLs contained within them, regardless of their actual placement. AI Mode uses a different method, assigning positions based on the URL's actual location within the response structure.

John Mueller confirmed in January 2026 that when the same URL appears in both an AI Overview and a standard blue link on the same page, Search Console records only one impression - it does not double-count. That deduplication methodology carries over into the new generative AI reports, though Google has not stated explicitly how position will be reported in the dedicated AI feature views.

Feedback channels and ongoing development

Google has included multiple feedback paths alongside the launch. According to the announcement, site owners can submit input through the "Submit feedback" link within Search Console itself, through a dedicated feedback form for these specific reports, or through the Google Search Central Community. Maoz and Samet wrote that the team is "continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights and data would be most helpful to inform their strategies, such as adding additional metrics over time" - language that suggests the current five-dimension reporting set is not the final state of the feature.

The specific mention of "additional metrics over time" is significant. Clicks and click-through rates, which are absent from the current announcement's described data points, would be the logical next addition. Without click data, it is not possible to calculate a meaningful CTR for AI feature appearances - making it difficult to compare the value of showing up in AI features against showing up in traditional search results.

What this means for publishers and SEO practitioners

For anyone managing a website's search performance, the new reports close a visibility gap that has existed since AI features became mainstream. The data will allow site owners to see which pages surface inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, compare that visibility across countries and devices, and monitor trends over time at hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly resolution.

Publishers who suspected their content was appearing inside AI features - driving impressions but not clicks - now have a structured way to confirm that hypothesis. Those who assumed AI features were irrelevant to their traffic can verify that assumption with actual data rather than inference from overall performance swings.

The caveat remains: the rollout is partial. Only a subset of Search Console properties will see these reports initially. Moshe Samet and Hillel Maoz did not specify what criteria determine which sites are included in the initial wave, or when the broader rollout will happen.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, announced by Hillel Maoz (Search Ecosystem Engineering Manager) and Moshe Samet (Product Manager Lead, Search Console)

What: New dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports in Google Search Console that provide separate visibility into how often website URLs appear within AI-powered features - including AI Overviews, AI Mode on Search, and generative AI features on Discover. The reports cover five data dimensions: impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only), and dates with hourly through monthly granularity.

When: Announced on June 3, 2026. Rolling out initially to a subset of websites, with broader availability to follow.

Where: Available within Google Search Console, under dedicated sections for Search and Discover performance. The data is drawn from the same underlying figures already present in the overall performance report but displayed in a separate, dedicated view.

Why: Publishers and website owners have lacked structured visibility into how their content surfaces within AI search features since AI Overviews launched in 2024. AI Mode and AI Overviews data was previously merged into aggregate Web Search totals with no separate breakdown, making it impossible to isolate AI feature performance. The new reports provide that isolated view, addressing a measurement gap that has affected traffic attribution and content strategy decisions across the web publishing and marketing industries.