Since late August 2026, every Search Console account worldwide has access to a new report: generative AI performance. For the first time, you can see how often your pages show up inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative features in Discover — broken out separately from the rest of your organic traffic. Right next to it sits a toggle that lets you pull your site out of all three surfaces with one click.
The problem is that both features launched together, under the same "generative AI" umbrella, and a lot of people are mixing them up with a tool that already existed: the Google-Extended token that blocks Gemini training. These are two completely separate mechanisms with different consequences. This guide sorts it out: what the report actually shows, what the toggle actually does, and how to use both without wrecking your visibility.
A rollout driven by regulation, not goodwill
The timeline tells the real story. The report and the opt-out control first appeared in the UK on June 3, 2026, under direct pressure from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which had accused Google of using site content in its generative answers without giving publishers a real way to opt out without also disappearing from regular results. The global rollout finished on August 31, 2026.
This wasn't a spontaneous product gift — it's a response to a regulatory obligation, and the CMA has already announced it wants page-level controls in place before March 2027 (versus property-level only today). If you manage several content types under the same domain, keep that in mind: granularity is going to get finer, not stay fixed.
What the report shows — and, more importantly, what it doesn't
The generative AI performance report sits in the same area as your regular Search performance report, with a dedicated filter. It breaks data down by page, country, device, and date (down to hourly granularity).
What it includes:
- Impressions in AI Overviews
- Impressions in AI Mode
- Impressions in Discover's generative features
What it still doesn't include, eight months after the initial launch:
- Clicks
- CTR
- The queries that triggered the appearance
- Any competitive comparison
Here's the detail most people miss: Google explicitly states these AI impressions weren't new data. They were already counted in your overall Search performance totals — the new report just isolates a slice that was already there, mixed in with everything else. Your aggregate numbers don't change; you just get an extra lens on them.
The "Search generative AI control" toggle — what it actually does
The setting lives in Search Console under Settings > Search generative AI. Three options:
| Option | Effect |
|---|---|
| Include (default) | Your content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover |
| Exclude | Your content is explicitly prevented from appearing across all three surfaces |
| Inherit | The property follows whatever setting is defined at the parent level (useful for multi-property setups) |
Google is explicit about what this control does not do — and that's the part most articles gloss over too fast:
- It does not affect your ranking in regular search results.
- It does not affect your presence in the standard Discover feed (only Discover's generative layer is in scope).
- It does not affect training of Google's AI models — for that, you still need to manage
Google-Extendedin yourrobots.txt. - It is not a ranking signal, positive or negative.
The confusion to avoid: this is not Google-Extended
If you've already blocked Google-Extended to stop Google from using your pages to train Gemini (see our full guide to blocking AI training crawlers), know that it doesn't automatically exclude you from AI Overviews or AI Mode. These are two independent layers:
| Mechanism | Where | Blocks what |
|---|---|---|
Google-Extended in robots.txt | Text file at the domain root | Use of already-crawled pages to train future Gemini models |
| Search generative AI control | Setting inside Search Console | Your content showing up in AI Overviews, AI Mode, generative Discover |
noindex | Meta tag or HTTP header | Any appearance in Search, including regular organic results |
nosnippet | Meta tag | Display of a text snippet, including inside rich results |
A site can perfectly well block training via Google-Extended while remaining fully eligible for AI Overviews (those surfaces rely on pages already crawled and indexed normally, not model training) — and, conversely, flip the generative exclusion toggle without touching robots.txt at all. Check both separately if either topic is part of your GEO strategy.
How to read this report on a concrete case
Here's an example representative of what we see regularly in audits. A product page shows 1,400 AI Overviews impressions over the last 30 days in the new report. Cross-reference that with GA4's "AI / Assistants" channel over the same period: sessions attributed to that channel for this page are essentially flat, up a marginal 3%.
The diagnosis is clear: the page is feeding Google's generated answer (price, availability, key specs likely lifted directly into the AI Overview) without ever driving a real click. That's a classic zero-click answer — the information alone satisfies the user, no need to visit the page.
This isn't necessarily something to fix: if the page's goal is brand awareness or making product data (price, stock) visible, the impression itself has value even without a click. But if you were counting on that page for qualified traffic toward a conversion, a gap between rising AI impressions and flat clicks should raise a flag — it's a signal to rework the hook or move the conversion goal higher up the funnel.
The reproducible 4-step method:
- Capture a baseline the day you first access the report — retroactive data isn't guaranteed beyond launch.
- Identify the pages with the highest AI impression volume and cross-reference them with clicks in the regular Search report and GA4 sessions.
- Classify each page: "AI that converts" (impressions and clicks rise together) vs. "pure zero-click" (impressions rise, clicks stagnate).
- Only decide on an opt-out after accumulating at least 4-6 weeks of stable data — AI impressions fluctuate more week-to-week than regular organic traffic.
Should you turn on the exclusion?
For the vast majority of SEO/GEO-driven sites like yours, no. Here are the rare cases where it makes sense:
- Your business model depends entirely on the click (ad-revenue media), and the areas where Google generates complete answers are cannibalizing your traffic with no upside.
- You have contractual or legal obligations requiring control over where your content gets reformulated by an AI.
- After several weeks of actual data, you find that most of your AI impressions are zero-click answers on high-commercial-value content you'd rather monetize a different way.
In every other case, excluding your site means giving up a free visibility surface that, even without a direct click, contributes to awareness and to the odds of being cited elsewhere. To go deeper into AI-citation mechanics beyond this one report, our partner Tesseract Studio published a complete guide to GEO that covers the topic more broadly.
Key takeaways
Search Console's generative AI performance report only shows impressions — no clicks, no CTR, no queries — but it finally lets you isolate what's coming from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover. The associated exclusion toggle is a property-by-property setting, born out of UK regulatory pressure, that affects neither your regular ranking nor Gemini model training (that's still Google-Extended's job). Before flipping anything, gather several weeks of data and cross it with GA4 clicks to tell pure zero-click pages apart from ones that actually convert.
FAQ
Does the new Search Console AI report replace third-party GEO tracking tools?
No. It only covers Google (AI Overviews, AI Mode, generative Discover) — not ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude — and it gives no data on text citations or triggering queries. AI visibility tracking tools are still needed for a multi-engine view.
If I turn on the exclusion, do I also disappear from regular Google Discover?
No. The control only touches Discover's generative layer. Your content keeps appearing in the standard Discover feed as usual.
Does the toggle affect my ranking in organic results?
Google is explicit: no impact, positive or negative. It's not a ranking signal.
Should I block Google-Extended in addition to flipping this toggle?
These are two independent decisions. Google-Extended concerns training of future models; the Search generative AI control concerns appearing in current generative answers. You can enable one without the other depending on your exact goal.
Before deciding anything about your presence in Google's AI answers, you first need to know where you stand on the fundamentals. Run the free SeAudit audit for your /100 score, or go straight to the full report for a detailed breakdown of your SEO and GEO visibility.