Google spent two years pushing AI answers into every results page while giving you no way to see yourself in them. That era just ended. As of August 31, every Search Console property in the world has two new switches: a report that shows how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a toggle that pulls your content out of Google’s AI features entirely. One deserves your attention. The other deserves your suspicion.
We’ve spent most of 2026 telling clients that AI search visibility was real but unmeasurable. When we wrote about why brands are invisible to ChatGPT back in April, the honest caveat was that nobody could see the scoreboard. That caveat just expired.
The scoreboard everyone asked for
Google introduced its generative AI performance report in June and finished rolling it out to every site at the end of August. Open Search Console today and you can see the impressions your pages earn inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the AI features in Discover, sliced by page, country, device, and date.
If you’re a marketing director who has spent this year answering “how are we doing in AI search” with a shrug, this is a real gift. And yes… we have been asking ourselves this question in our own agency for our own Website. With that said, you can finally point at a number. You can watch it move when you publish something worth quoting. You can see which pages Google’s AI reaches for and which ones it walks past.
What it counts. What it hides.
Now the fine print. The report counts impressions and stops there. No queries. No clicks. No click-through rate, no position, no revenue trail. It answers the question you were asking last year: are we visible? It can’t answer the question your CFO is asking this year: is any of it earning anything?
That gap matters because AI search doesn’t hand off traffic the way blue links did. Someone asks a question, reads the answer, and leaves. If your brand shaped that answer, the report counts it. Everything that happens next, the branded search two days later, the direct visit, the mention in a sales call, lives outside the report entirely.
So treat the new number as a direction check, not a KPI. Pair it with the signals that show intent actually moved: branded search volume, direct traffic, and the “how did you hear about us” field your sales team keeps forgetting to read.
The off switch is a decision focused on business verticals.
The second switch is the one to handle with care. The same rollout gave every site owner a control to block their content from Google’s AI features. Flip it and your pages stop appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google is explicit about the cost: opted-out sites get no traffic and no impressions from those features. Your regular rankings stay untouched. The AI shelf just goes dark.
If you’re a publisher whose product is the content itself, run that math seriously. An AI answer that substitutes for your article is a real loss, and the toggle is a legitimate business lever.
If you sell anything else, the math points the other way. Your buyers are standing in the AI aisle asking the clerk what to buy. Blocking Google’s AI doesn’t punish Google. It takes your product off the shelf while your competitors stay stocked. Publishers can argue AI answers replace their product. For everyone else, AI answers are the shelf.
Read it monthly. Then get back to work.
Our advice after a few weeks inside these reports: check the trend monthly, note which pages earn citations, and resist the urge to build a dashboard shrine to AI impressions. Teams that chase impressions will produce the same thin, keyword-shaped sludge that chasing rankings produced. Same panic, new metric.
What earns the citation hasn’t changed. When we covered llms.txt in July, the point was never the file. The point was that AI systems quote brands with a sharp point of view, real proof behind their claims, and messaging their own team can repeat without checking notes. Now that work finally shows up on a scoreboard. The scoreboard didn’t change the game. It just turned on the lights.
If you’d rather your brand be the answer instead of the audience, that’s the work we do. Bring us the report. We’ll bring the plan.