Answer engine optimization · Research
Search Console's new AI report only sees Google. Here's the blind spot.
Google Search Console added a fresh tab this year. It breaks down how many times your pages popped up in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, and device. A lot of owners searching "why am I not getting AI Overview" or "AI Overview not showing up in Search Console" probably think they've found the solution. They haven't, and that difference is important to get before you start relying on it.
They announced this Generative AI performance report in June and have been adding it to accounts piece by piece, slotting it into the Performance section as a new tab beside your usual Search data. Google's definition of an impression here is narrow: a link to your site showed up inside one of their generative AI features. That's the whole story, and it's a narrow one. You don't get click data, no CTR, no average position, no query breakdown. If your page was cited in an AI Overview answer, you get a tally. What the answer actually said, if anyone read beyond it, if they ever visited your site, none of that is in the report yet.
AI Overviews and AI Mode get lumped together into a single number, too. Two completely different experiences, one figure, and no way to know which one actually mentioned you. Discover gets its own separate report, so at least that's split out. The Search side isn't.
The number only counts one company's opinion of you
Here's what matters more than any of that, though. This report is Google's report about Google. It says nothing about ChatGPT, nothing about Perplexity, nothing about Claude. One article about the launch said it straight: there's no Search Console for any of those. If a customer opens ChatGPT and asks for the best local option, that entire conversation happens outside Google's index and outside this report, for good. You could have a perfect AI Overview count and still be totally invisible in the tool a growing chunk of your customers open first.
I do a regular audit for a med spa in Miami, based on the questions its real customers type into ChatGPT instead of Google. I tested forty six of those questions. The business got named in thirteen answers. Its own website was listed as a source exactly once. The other twelve times it was mentioned through someone else's page. Thirty three questions came back with no mention of the business at all. None of that activity would ever show up in a Google Search Console report, new tab or old, because none of it happened on Google. A business could watch its GSC AI numbers go up every month and never notice that thirty three-question blind spot sitting right beside it on another engine.
Two catches inside Google's own number
There's a counting quirk you should know before you trust the number on screen. Google counts impressions two ways: once at the property level, and once at the page level. If an AI Overview answer cites two different pages from your site in the same response, that's one property-level impression but two page-level impressions. Pull up the wrong tab and compare it against last month's traditional Search numbers, and the totals won't match up like you'd assume. Neither number is incorrect. They're answering slightly different questions, and Google hasn't made that clear inside the interface yet.
Search Console also includes a setting that lets a site owner block their content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover, and the default is to be included. Nobody flips that switch by accident on a normal day, but it's worth checking if your impression count is a flat zero everywhere instead of just low. A quiet opt-out set somewhere up the chain, an agency tweak from months back, a plugin that altered robots directives, any of those could make your report look like total invisibility when it's really just a setting.
What to actually do with the new tab
That's not a criticism of Google for building this. Impressions-only is a normal starting point for a brand-new report, and Google has said plainly they're still figuring out what other metrics to add. The trouble starts when you treat "I checked my AI visibility" and "I checked my Search Console AI tab" as the same statement. They only cover a slice of the same question, and that slice belongs exclusively to Google.
So what do you actually do with the new tab? Open it, absolutely. It's free, it's already in an account you probably have, and an upward trend in Google's own AI surfaces is still useful info, even without clicks. Just don't let it be your only check. If a customer would ask ChatGPT the same thing they'd type into Google, and plenty do now, you need to see what that answer says, and whether your own site ever gets used to build it. That's a different question than the one this report answers, and the only way to answer it today is to ask the AI directly, the way your customer would, and read exactly what it says back.
Sources: Search Engine Journal, "Google Now Reports AI Search Impressions" (2026); CrawlRaven, "Google Search Console AI Performance Reports" (2026).