Search Console has a new Generative AI section: impressions for pages used to ground AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover. No clicks, no CTR, no position. It is reaching UK accounts first.
Table of contents
- What this is about
- The design: what Google is reporting and how
- The numbers: what the report contains
- What could still be wrong
- What to do on Monday
- FAQ
- Key takeaways
Key takeaways
- The Generative AI report is rolling out primarily to UK Search Console users first, but will eventually be available to all.
- The report shows impressions only — no clicks, no CTR, no position data.
- Marie Haynes attributes the existence of this data partly to regulatory pressure from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.
- A new in-console toggle lets site owners opt out of grounding AI features. Haynes advises against using it for most sites, on the grounds that opting out of AI features increasingly means opting out of Search visibility.
- Without click data, the report’s most useful application is cross-referencing AI impression volume against standard performance data to find pages that hold value beyond what the AI answer delivers.
What this is about
For two years site owners could see that AI answers were quoting them only by searching manually. This report replaces the guesswork with a count — and stops there, because it reports selection, not what happened afterwards. That gap defines both what it is good for and how it will be misread.
The design: what Google is reporting and how
The new section sits under the existing Performance area in Search Console, labelled “Generative AI.” It appears as a dedicated view within the interface site owners already use for standard search performance.
Filters available at launch: pages, countries, devices and dates.
Three surfaces fall within the report’s scope: the generative summaries above organic results (AI Overviews), the conversational search interface (AI Mode), and AI-driven features inside Discover. Whether the impression counts are broken out by surface or rolled into one number is not stated in the source.
Marie Haynes writes that knowing which pages Google’s models select as grounding sources is a useful signal even without downstream click attribution.
The opt-out toggle — also new — lets site owners prevent their content from being used to ground AI responses. Haynes describes this as more accessible than the existing google-extended directive in robots.txt, though it appears to accomplish a similar function. Her position on using it: stay opted in for most sites, because opting out of AI features increasingly means opting out of visibility in Search.
The numbers: what the report contains
The source reports no aggregate figures — no impression totals, no CTR benchmarks, no click volumes. What it does establish is which fields exist.
In the Generative AI report: impressions, plus filters by page, country, device and date range.
Not in it: clicks, click-through rate, average position, and, as far as the source says, API access.
Already in the standard Performance report: all of the above except the AI surfaces themselves.
Source: Marie Haynes, reporting on the rollout to UK accounts.
The missing columns matter. Impressions in AI features do not map cleanly to traffic. A page can be selected as a grounding source and still receive no click, because the answer resolved the question on the results page. Until click data is added, the report measures selection frequency, not audience delivery — a distinction we set out in our review of the three GEO claims.
What could still be wrong
How an impression is counted. The source does not say how Google counts an impression here, or whether a threshold applies before a page appears in the report. Until that is documented, small numbers deserve the least confidence.
Rollout skew. The report is currently reaching UK accounts first. If your site’s UK traffic has different content patterns from your US or global traffic, the pages surfaced during the UK-only phase may not represent your full grounding footprint once the rollout completes. A UK-heavy news site and a US-focused e-commerce site will see very different early data.
Surface conflation. If AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover AI features are reported under a single impression count rather than separately, a spike in one surface is invisible against the others. A page could be gaining in AI Mode and losing in AI Overviews simultaneously, and the aggregate would hide both trends.
Tracking changes as a confounder. The report is new. Any before/after comparison you run in the first weeks is comparing a period with the report to a period without it — not a measurement of a real change in grounding frequency. Wait until you have a meaningful run of data before drawing trend conclusions.
The CMA context. Dr. Marie Haynes notes that pressure from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority drove Google toward greater attribution and publisher transparency. That regulatory context means the data exists partly to satisfy an external requirement, not purely to serve site owners. Whether the definition of “impression” here matches what you’d define as meaningful exposure is worth checking once full documentation is published.
What to do on Monday
Pull the report if your account has access. If it doesn’t, note the date and check weekly — the rollout is ongoing.
When access arrives, the first useful action is a cross-reference, not a celebration or a panic. Export the pages with the highest AI impression counts, then open the standard Performance report and filter to the same pages. Look for two groups:
1. High AI impressions, high standard clicks. These pages hold value beyond the AI answer. Something on them, original data, first-hand experience, images, depth, is pulling readers through. Study what that is. 2. High AI impressions, low standard clicks. The AI answer may be resolving the query completely. These pages are contributing to grounding without generating traffic. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s worth knowing.
Don’t use the opt-out toggle reactively. Opting out because impressions are high but clicks are low treats a measurement gap as a strategy. If the AI is misrepresenting your content or brand, the more durable fix is improving how your site presents that information.
Hold off on trend analysis until the report has been running long enough to show a real pattern. An uncontrolled before/after on a report that didn’t exist before is not a measurement of anything useful.
FAQ
If my pages have high impressions in the Generative AI report, does that mean my traffic will increase?
Not necessarily. An impression in an AI Overview means Google selected your content as a grounding source. Whether that generates a click depends on whether the AI answer satisfies the user’s query on its own. Where AI impressions are high and standard clicks are low, the likeliest reading is that the answer resolved the query without a visit. High AI impressions alongside high standard clicks is the more valuable pattern to find and understand.
Is the new in-console opt-out toggle the same as setting google-extended in robots.txt?
They appear to serve a similar function, both allow a site owner to signal that content should not be used to ground AI features, but the toggle is described as more accessible than editing robots.txt directly. Whether there are edge cases where the two signals diverge, or whether one takes precedence over the other, is not yet documented. Until Google clarifies the relationship between them, if you already have a google-extended directive in place, check that the toggle state in Search Console is consistent with your intended setting.
