Search Console has a report built for this: the generative AI performance report. Google announced it in June 2026, writing on its Search Central blog that it was launching "new Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, including dedicated reports for Search and Discover, to help you understand your site's visibility within generative AI features on Search." As of August 31, 2026, Google's help page says Google has "rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide."
What does the report cover?
It covers two generative AI features on Google Search: AI Overviews and AI Mode. The help page lists these as the two capabilities included, and adds "we expect to update this list over time as we develop Google Search." Google Discover has its own separate generative AI performance report — it is not part of this one; the blog post confirms both exist as "dedicated reports for Search and Discover."
What does the report show?
The metric is impressions. The help page defines them plainly: "Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search." You can break that number down by four dimensions the help page names: Pages ("groups data by the final URL linked by a generative AI feature after any redirects"), Countries ("groups data by the country where the search originated"), Dates (grouped by day, week, or month, in Pacific Time), and Devices (desktop, tablet, or mobile). You can also filter by search type — "Web: text-based" versus "Web: multimodal," where an image was part of the search. The newest data can be preliminary, shown with a dotted line, "meaning it's still being collected and might change in the next few hours."
The pages we read describe this report by its impressions metric and its four dimensions. They don't describe a clicks column or a queries column for this particular report, so we're not claiming either is there — if you need click or query-level detail, that's a question for Search Console's regular performance report, which the help page treats as separate.
Why might you not see the report yet?
The help page gives two reasons. First, "not all properties have access to the report, as we're rolling out over time" — a note that sits next to the page's own statement that rollout reached all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026, so timing may still vary by property. Second, "your site hasn't received enough impressions in generative AI features on Google Search." The help page adds that this may be because you've excluded your site from Search generative AI features, and fixing it means making sure your site is included in those features rather than opted out.
Does this data show up anywhere else in Search Console?
Yes. The help page states that "the generative AI performance report includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report (Search results)," so the same impressions also feed into the regular, overall performance report, filtered to the Web search type. A related Google document on AI features says it another way: AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic "are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console" and shows up under the search type "Web." The dedicated generative AI report is a separate view, not a separate pool of data — these numbers were already in your regular Search Console traffic before this report existed.
Using it alongside a manual Perplexity check
Search Console only covers Google. It has nothing to say about Perplexity, which runs its own separate index and answer engine. Our own reasoning from what the report counts: it tells you how many times links to your site were shown in a Google AI feature, not whether your brand's name appears in the answer text — a link showing and a name being mentioned are two different things, and impressions measure only the first.
For Perplexity, there is no equivalent report to open — you check by asking the questions a buyer would ask and reading what comes back, covered in our article on checking Perplexity and Google AI Overviews mentions. Used together, Search Console gives a directional impressions trend for Google, and a manual Perplexity check tells you whether your brand is actually named in an answer, on either engine.
If you want that check done for you at a larger scale, our free GEO audit runs 10 buyer questions three times each through Perplexity and Google AI Overviews and reports what the resulting 60 answers name and cite for your category.