You can now find out, in about ten minutes and for nothing, whether Google's AI answers are using your website. The Google Search Console AI report opened to every site worldwide on 31 August 2026, and it is the first free report showing which of your pages appear inside Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.
It is not a traffic report, and it will not tell you that AI brought in four hundred visitors last month. Used properly it answers a sharper question: are you in the answers at all, and which page is doing the work? Here is what it shows, what it hides, where the clicks end up in your analytics, and a routine for one evening a month.
What the report is
Search Console has always told you how your site performs in the list of blue links. The generative AI performance report does the same job for the written answers that now sit at the top of Google, where one response is built from several websites and links to them as sources.
Google started offering it on 3 June 2026, initially to a limited group of sites that was mostly in the UK, then rolled it out worldwide on 31 August 2026. If your domain is verified in Search Console you will find it under Performance, though some sites will not see it until they have collected enough impressions.
What you get is impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, device and date. An impression means a link to your page was shown inside one of those answers. That is the whole raw material: no clicks, no click-through rate, no search queries.
What it shows, and what it hides
The pages dimension is the useful one. Sort by it and you get a plain list of the pages Google's AI has been borrowing: your homepage, a service page, a guide you had forgotten you wrote. Two or three pages usually explain the whole month, and they are almost always the ones that answer a question the way a person would ask it.
What is missing matters as much. Queries are not included, so you cannot see the question someone typed before your page appeared. You know you were surfaced, not why. Position is slippery too: every link inside a single AI Overview shares one position number, so a "position 3" describes the rank of the answer, not your place within it.
Not seeing the report does not mean you have no visibility. Google withholds it until a site has enough impressions to show something meaningful, so a new or very quiet site can be cited and still see nothing there. Also check that you have not excluded your own site from generative AI features, a setting we covered in our post on opting out of Google's AI Overviews.
Where the clicks actually land
Here is the part that catches people out. When someone clicks your link from inside a Google AI answer, Google Analytics files that visit as ordinary organic search. Not as AI. The separate AI Assistant channel only picks up visits from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and Google's own AI features are excluded from it by design.
So a dashboard claiming a percentage of your traffic is "AI" is usually measuring one slice and calling it the lot. The analytics team at Cultured Digital set this out on 10 October 2026 after working through Google's own documentation: AI Overviews and AI Mode clicks sit inside organic search, assistant referrals sit in their own channel, and the two should be kept apart rather than added together. Your organic figure may already contain AI-driven visits you cannot separate out, which is why these impressions matter.
What good looks like in the UK
Figment, a UK agency, updated its State of AI Search on 22 October 2026 using 21 of its clients' websites. Visits from AI assistants rose from 0.83% of all visits in September 2025 to 1.31% a year later, and on 13 of the 14 sites it could measure, AI visitors acted at least as often as visitors from Google. Over the same year, Google clicks across 18 of those sites fell 22% even though the sites appeared in results 8% more often. That is one agency's client list: treat it as direction, not a benchmark.
Semrush published its first UK AI Visibility benchmark on 13 October 2026. The finding that matters to a small business: across the four big platforms, any two agreed on only 63 to 70 of their top 100 mentioned brands in the UK, and just 24 UK domains appeared in the top 100 on all four every month.
Three numbers to write down each month: total impressions, the pages that earned them, and the enquiries that came in during the same window. Track enquiries against impressions, not clicks, because the clicks are hidden inside your organic total.
What earns a citation
Visibility in AI answers is not a dark art. It is answer engine optimisation, and the ingredients are unglamorous. Answer the follow-up questions plainly: the areas you cover, your hours, your guarantees, roughly what things cost, how long a job takes. State facts a machine can lift out in one piece. Publish proof, meaning real photographs, case studies and customer reviews. Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere your business appears online.
Our guide to answer engine optimisation goes deeper on the mechanics. The short version: a clear page wins twice, once when the machine chooses it, once when the reader stays.
One evening a month
1. Open the report and set it to the last 28 days. Group it by pages and copy your top five into a note. Those are the pages Google's AI has been using.
2. Ask Google five questions a real buyer would ask. What something costs, whether you cover their town, how soon you can start. See whether you appear, and who appears alongside you.
3. Write down the enquiries you received. Two or three months of this and you will know whether a rising impression line means anything for the business.
4. If the report is empty, do not panic and do not ignore it. Check your site has not been excluded from generative AI features, then find the pages that could answer a buyer's question better.
The report will not hand you customers on its own. What it does is remove the guesswork, for free, about a part of Google most of your competitors are still arguing about in forums.
How Google Search Console's generative AI report worked as of 28 October 2026, per Google's help pages and dated reporting from Cultured Digital (10 October), Figment (22 October) and Semrush (13 October).
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