The wait is over, although the most important metric is still missing

Ever since AI Overviews rolled out globally in 2024, the SEO industry has lived with an uncomfortable paradox: knowing with certainty that traffic was declining because of generative answers, but having no official Google data to quantify how much visibility was being won or lost inside those answers.

On June 3, 2026, Google announced the launch of the new generative AI performance reports in Search Console, including dedicated reports for Search and Discover, designed to help site owners understand visibility inside Google Search’s generative AI features.

The news matters. And it deserves careful analysis, because what Google offers today is useful but incomplete, the regulatory context behind it is revealing, and the comparison with what Bing had already made available since February shows how much ground is still left to cover.

What exactly these new reports are and what they measure

The new reports cover two separate surfaces: generative AI features inside Search —including AI Overviews and AI Mode— and generative AI features inside Discover. The announcement was authored by Hillel Maoz, Search Ecosystem Engineering Manager, and Moshe Samet, Product Manager Lead for Search Console.

The five data dimensions currently available are:

• Impressions: how many times the site’s URLs appeared inside generative AI features in Search and Discover.
• Pages: which specific URLs are appearing in AI results.
• Countries: geographic breakdown of AI visibility.
• Devices: desktop vs. mobile, available only in Search, not in Discover.
• Dates: hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity.

What the report does not include —and this is the most discussed part of the announcement— is click data.

That is not surprising. The SEO community had already anticipated that clicks from AI answers would be the last metric to arrive, if they arrived at all. Google says it will add more metrics over time, but clicks are not included today. And without click data, it is impossible to calculate the real CTR of appearances in generative AI, or model traffic impact directly.

How it relates to the existing performance report

There is an important technical nuance here: the new reports do not create a separate data silo. Generative AI data remains included inside the general performance report, where it will continue to be tracked to provide a global view of site visibility in Google Search. What Google is introducing is a separate view dedicated to the visibility of generative AI features.

This solves a problem that had been frustrating the industry for more than a year. When Google confirmed in June 2025 that AI Mode clicks, impressions, and position data counted toward Search Console performance totals, it added them to the existing web search figures instead of giving them a separate segment. Analyst Glenn Gabe pointed out at the time that the ten blue links, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and AI Mode were all grouped under the same reporting category. Today’s update begins to solve that problem, at least for impressions on AI surfaces.

What this means in practice is simple: if your site has strong organic rankings but your total impressions have risen while CTR has fallen, the new report will let you see what share of those impressions is coming from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and what share is still traditional organic search. That distinction had never been possible inside Google’s native tools.

Phased rollout: limited launch, United Kingdom first

The rollout is currently happening only for a small subset of site owners in the United Kingdom. There will be a global expansion at some point, but no date has been announced.

The choice of the United Kingdom as the first market is not accidental. The decision to start testing there is directly tied to the regulatory pressure from the UK Competition and Markets Authority. On June 3, the CMA stated that the requirements imposed on Google under the digital markets competition regime were designed to give publishers more control and greater bargaining power over how their content is used.

That regulatory motivation matters because it also explains why the announcement arrived alongside a second feature of equal significance.

The blocking control: the other major June 3 update

Alongside the performance reports, Google announced that it is adding a new control in Search Console that allows sites to block their content from appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews, AI Mode, or AI Overviews in Discover. Site owners will be able to decide whether they want their site to appear in Google’s generative AI answers and help ground those answers.

Google explicitly specified that sites opting out will not receive traffic or impressions from generative AI features. But it also clarified that this decision will not harm their rankings in standard search results.

The control will be available for review and configuration before it takes effect. Google will start honoring it on June 17, 2026.

There is an important terminology detail worth clarifying: this control is different from Google-Extended. Google-Extended prevents Google from training its AI models on site content. This new control is more specific: it is about whether content appears inside live AI answers, not about using that content for model training.

Does it make sense to use the blocking control? In almost no case, and the reason is arithmetic. AI Overviews already reaches more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. Opting out means giving up exposure at scale on the fastest-growing surfaces. The exception could be a premium content publisher that has calculated AI appearances cannibalize subscriptions more than they support them.

For the overwhelming majority of industrial and services B2B companies, visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode is an opportunity to maximize, not a risk to defend against.

Bing moved first: lessons from the AI Performance we already know

There is a context that cannot be ignored when analyzing Google’s announcement: Microsoft moved four months earlier. Microsoft launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools in beta on February 10, 2026.

At Smart Team, this feature was already covered in February when Bing launched it. If you have not read it, the recommended article is AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, where the available data and the interpretation of generative search visibility metrics are analyzed in detail.

The comparison between the two tools is instructive:

What Bing AI Performance offers that Google still does not in its report:

• direct citations (how many times your site was explicitly cited in an AI answer)
• grounding queries (the queries that triggered your content to be used to ground an AI answer)
• More granular data on the type of answer in which you appeared.

What Google has that Bing does not offer at the same scale: volume.

The right strategic architecture in June 2026 is to use both tools in a complementary way: Google impression data to understand exposure volume in the largest ecosystem, and Bing data to obtain richer qualitative signals about how and where content is being cited.

Why this matters more than it seems

The appearance of these reports has a strategic meaning that goes beyond having one more dashboard.

First, it normalizes AI visibility as a business metric. Until now, visibility in AI Overviews was a phenomenon every SEO professional sensed but no one could quantify for a client or executive committee. Having impression data in Search Console turns AI visibility into a measurable KPI, comparable over time and comparable across competitors once benchmarking tools for this data exist.

Second, it forces a redefinition of content success. Until now, content was mainly evaluated by rankings and traffic. From now on, there is a third dimension: generative AI impressions. An article can rank third in organic search, generate little direct traffic, and still appear in thousands of AI Mode answers per week. Is that article a high-performing asset or a low-performing one? Without the new report, the question was impossible to answer.

Third, it completes the investment case for GEO. In proposals to B2B clients, the argument has always been that optimization for generative AI engines is not a futuristic luxury but a present necessity. The new Search Console report provides the measurement instrument that makes that case demonstrable.

Fourth, historical data is limited but valuable. The report data appears to begin on May 18, 2026. That means there is only a short historical window available today. Companies that configure tracking correctly now will gain a historical baseline advantage over those that arrive late.

How to prepare your site to benefit from the new report

The generative AI performance report measures what is already happening. It does not change it. To improve the numbers it will show, content and technical strategy must align with the factors that determine citability in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

These are the priority actions already identified and summarized in a specific article on —- > “90-day GEO action plan for industrial SMEs: week by week“

The gap that still exists: what we need and Google still does not provide

To be direct: the new report is a valuable first step, but it leaves the most important questions for a solid GEO strategy unanswered.

Without click data, it is impossible to model the economic value of an appearance in AI Overviews. Without query data, it is impossible to understand for which specific queries the content is being cited and which ones generate the most appearances. Without position data inside the generative answer —is it the first cited source, the third?— the granularity is insufficient for tactical optimization.

Google says it will add more metrics over time. The industry hopes that includes clicks and queries. Until then, the combination of Search Console for impression volume, Bing AI Performance for citation signals, and specialized tools such as Ahrefs Brand Radar, LLM Pulse, or GEO Metrics for multi-engine coverage remains the most complete measurement infrastructure available.

The new measurement standard has arrived: is your site ready?

The simultaneous arrival of AI Performance reports in Bing (February 2026) and Google (June 2026) marks the moment when generative search visibility stops being a promise and becomes a metric. There is no longer an excuse not to measure. The question now is what those numbers will show when the report reaches your property.

If your impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode are low despite strong organic rankings, the likely diagnosis is one of three things: content structured for search engines but not for extraction by AI models, absence of complete schema markup, or lack of original perspective and differentiated data that a model wants to cite.

At Smart Team, help is available to prepare the site so that when the report reaches your property, the numbers justify the GEO investment you are already making or should be considering.

Contact our team →

Frequently asked questions about the generative AI performance report in Search Console

When will the generative AI report be available in Search Console for all sites? Google has not announced a date. The current rollout is limited to a subset of site owners in the United Kingdom. Global expansion will come, but with no confirmed timeline. The historical data available in the report begins on May 18, 2026.

Does the generative AI report show click data from AI Overviews? No. The report includes impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, but it does not include clicks or CTR. Google has confirmed that it will add more metrics over time, but it has not given a timeline for including click data.

Can I block my site from appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode? Yes, Google is testing a control that allows sites to opt out of generative AI features. This option does not affect rankings in traditional organic search. However, sites that opt out will stop receiving impressions and traffic from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover. For most B2B companies, opting out is not strategically advisable.

How is this report different from Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance? Bing launched its AI Performance report in February 2026, four months earlier. Bing offers direct citation data and grounding queries that Google still does not provide. Google offers greater volume by covering the search engine with the largest global user base. Both tools are complementary and should be used in parallel for a complete GEO measurement strategy.

What can I do today to improve my impressions in AI Overviews? The highest-impact actions are: structuring content so the direct answer appears in the first paragraphs of each section, implementing complete schema markup (Article, FAQPage, Organization), producing content with original data and expert perspective that models cannot generate on their own, and building editorial presence in authority sources that AI models use as references.