If your organic traffic fell in 2026 and AI Overviews is the suspect, Search Console can now half-answer the question. The generative AI performance report shows how often your URLs appeared in generative AI features on Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus generative features in Discover. Open Performance and click the expandable generative AI tab, or go straight to search.google.com/search-console/performance/search-analytics/ai.
Know the limit before you open it. The report offers one metric, impressions, across four dimensions: Pages, Countries, Dates and Devices (Google help). No clicks, no click-through rate, no average position, no queries. So it cannot tell you AI Overviews cost you traffic. It gives you AI impressions, and you work out the rest against the main Performance report, where AI clicks are blended into Web search with no way to separate them.
Three things people get wrong about this report
There was no standalone announcement on 31 August 2026. Google announced the reports on 3 June 2026 in "Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console" by Hillel Maoz and Moshe Samet, rolling them out "to a subset of websites" first. The global date lives in a note appended to that post and to the help docs: "Note: As of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide." Barry Schwartz covered it for Search Engine Land on 31 August 2026.
You cannot filter the main Performance report to AI. The search appearance types Google documents include none for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Anyone telling you to add an AI search appearance filter is describing a control that does not exist as of 3 September 2026.
Google never writes "no clicks" in so many words. The absence is established by omission: the dimension list is Pages, Countries, Dates, Devices, and impressions is the only metric named. The explicit statement is third party, from Search Engine Roundtable's 1 September 2026 writeup: "you should see it as an expandable tab under the main performance report", with "(no click data and no query data)".
What the report gives you, and what it holds back
Available, verbatim from Google's help page:
- Impressions: "How often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover."
- Pages, Countries, Devices ("available for Search results").
- Dates, at "hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity". "All dates are in Pacific Time Zone (PT)."
- An export button "to download both the chart and table data."
Withheld: clicks, CTR, average position and queries. There is no documented API or BigQuery access either, and the bulk export schema carries no AI dimension, so this is an interface-only report for now. The table caps at 1,000 rows. Two scope notes for comparisons: it "includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report", and "Search Console doesn't include data from experiments in Search Labs".
Google did signal more coming, "such as adding additional metrics over time". Until then, plan around one number.
How impressions and clicks are counted in AI features
These rules, from Google's data anomalies and definitions documentation, decide what your charts can mean.
For AI Overviews and AI Mode, "Impression: Standard impression rules apply." The standard rule: "If a property appears twice on a Search results page, it counts as a single impression." A URL cited in an AI Overview that also ranks as a blue link is one impression. Your AI and Web impressions overlap, and you cannot subtract one from the other.
"An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position." Position in AI Mode "follows the same methodology as a Google Search results page", and "If a user asks a follow-up question within AI Mode, they are essentially performing a new query."
On clicks: "Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click." The same applies in AI Mode. That is the crux of the diagnostic. Your AI clicks sit in the main Performance report totals already, counted but never separable.
Step by step: separate an AI shift from a ranking drop
Allow for the lag first: "Collected data is usually available in 2 to 3 days" (Google help). Never diagnose the last 72 hours.
- Fix a comparison window. In the main Performance report, use Compare date ranges. Google's advice on the compare feature: "consider using the Weekly or Monthly granularity option. Aggregating by week or month neutralizes the 'day-of-the-week' effect". Also, "You can have only one comparison at a time." Compare a clean month against the same month before the decline.
- Establish the shape of the loss. Clicks down with impressions flat points one way. Both down points the other. Write both numbers down before forming a theory.
- Go to the page level. Pages tab, sort by click difference, take the ten worst. A ranking problem usually concentrates in a topic cluster or a template. An AI shift usually spreads across informational pages regardless of cluster.
- Check queries for those pages. Filter to one page, open Queries, compare periods. If the queries that lost clicks kept their impressions and positions, ranking is intact and something changed above you on the result page. If impressions fell too, you lost visibility, which is a ranking or indexing story.
- Open the generative AI report for the same window and pages. Rising AI impressions on pages whose Web clicks fell is the pattern consistent with AI features taking the click. Flat or absent AI impressions there means AI Overviews is probably not your culprit.
- Check what else changed. A core update, a migration, a robots or noindex change, seasonality, a competitor's new page. Our free SEO tool stack covers the checks that rule these in or out.
- Write the conclusion as a probability. Because AI clicks are not separable, the honest output is "consistent with an AI impression shift" or "consistent with a ranking loss", never proven attribution.
One quirk to remember: some queries are omitted for privacy, and "They're included in chart totals, unless a query filter is applied" (Google help). Query-level totals will not reconcile with page totals.