How to Track AI Overviews Traffic in Search Console (2026)

Where is the Generative AI performance report in Search Console?

Search Console’s Generative AI performance report rolled out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026, the same date the Search generative AI control rolled out. It shows how often links to a site appeared in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down over time, by page, and by dimensions like device and country. It sits alongside the regular Performance report as its own, separate view.

Until this rolled out, site owners had no first-party way to see whether their pages were being pulled into an AI Overview at all — the only method was running searches by hand and watching which sites got named. That manual check is still useful, but it is no longer the only data point available.

What does the Generative AI performance report actually show?

It shows impressions. Google defines an impression here as a link to your site being shown to a user inside a generative AI feature — AI Overviews or AI Mode. The report groups results by page using the final URL after any redirects, and it also breaks impressions down by things like device and country, the same way the regular Performance report does for classic search results.

Two limits worth knowing before reading too much into a number: Search Labs experiments are not included in the data, and Google Discover has its own separate report, so generative AI features appearing inside Discover are not counted here either.

Why doesn’t it show clicks?

Because the documentation doesn’t say it does, and it is worth being precise about that rather than assuming a click metric exists just because the regular Performance report has one. The Generative AI performance report is described as showing impressions — a link appearing inside an AI Overview or AI Mode response — not clicks on that link. Treat any number from this report as visibility, not traffic.

That does not mean AI-feature activity is invisible everywhere in Search Console. Google has separately documented that AI-feature traffic is counted inside the regular Performance report under the “Web” search type, alongside ordinary organic clicks. The two reports answer different questions: the Generative AI performance report tells you how often you were shown inside an AI answer; the regular Performance report, filtered to Web, still carries whatever clicks eventually happened.

How do you read both reports together?

In practice that means checking a page’s row in the Generative AI performance report for a rise or fall in AI Overview impressions, then checking the same page’s row in the regular Performance report to see whether clicks moved at all in the same period. Neither report alone tells the full story, and neither one invents a click-through rate for AI Overviews specifically — that figure is not documented as available anywhere in Search Console.

What if you see no data at all?

Google documents two reasons. The site may simply not have enough impressions in AI Overviews or AI Mode yet to populate the report — a low-traffic or newer page may show nothing for a while even if it is technically eligible. Or the site, or that specific property, has been set to Exclude under the Search generative AI control, in which case content is deliberately kept out of those features and won’t generate impressions to report. Check the Search generative AI control setting before assuming anything is broken.

Either way, empty is not automatically bad news. It can mean a page genuinely isn’t being pulled into AI Overviews for any query yet, which is a different problem than being excluded by a setting — and the fix for each is completely different.

Does this work for tracking ChatGPT traffic too?

No, and it is worth saying plainly rather than improvising an answer. There is no documented first-party report equivalent to Search Console’s Generative AI performance report for ChatGPT. OpenAI’s crawler documentation describes robots.txt controls — OAI-SearchBot for search inclusion, GPTBot for training, ChatGPT-User for on-request page visits — but nothing describing an impressions dashboard for site owners.

Without that dashboard, the practical approach is the same manual method that predates Search Console’s new report: confirm OAI-SearchBot is allowed in robots.txt, then run the actual questions a business wants to own through ChatGPT search and note whether the site is named. See how to rank in ChatGPT search results for the crawler-access side of that check, and our free AI visibility checker for a readiness pass covering crawler access, snippets, and schema together.

Why do third-party “AI visibility scores” deserve skepticism?

Because Google has said outright that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems. Any product scoring a site’s “AI visibility” against Google specifically is inferring, not measuring — it cannot see what Google’s systems actually did, only guess from public signals. That does not make the guess worthless, but it is not the same category of evidence as Search Console’s own impressions report, which comes directly from Google.

The same caution applies twice over for ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any other engine, since we are not aware of any of them publishing a comparable first-party impressions report for site owners. A score claiming precision it cannot document is a marketing claim, not a measurement, and it is worth treating it that way regardless of which vendor is selling it.