Google rolled out a new report to all websites on August 31. It sits inside Search Console and shows you how many times your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The report includes impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates, but does not include click data. That means you can see which pages Google’s AI is pulling into its answers, but you can’t yet see if anyone is clicking through to your site from them.
I logged into six client accounts this morning. Four had the report. Two didn’t. If yours is live, this is the first time you’ve been able to measure whether you exist in the part of Google that’s eating more of the search results every month. Here’s what to do with it.
Check if you have the report
Open Search Console. On the left menu, look under Search results. If you see a tab called Generative AI, you’re in. If not, you might see it in the next few weeks, or your site might not have enough AI impressions yet for Google to bother showing it.
Google has said that sites without enough AI impressions might not see a report. That’s not necessarily bad. It might mean AI Overviews aren’t triggering for your search terms yet, or it might mean your pages aren’t making the cut. You won’t know until you see traffic trends over the next quarter.
If you do have the report, click into it. You’ll see a list of pages and how many AI impressions each one got. Compare it to your normal Search results report for the same period. If a page is getting 500 regular impressions and 200 AI impressions, that AI number was always part of the 500. Google has simply split them into their own view.
Look for pages with high AI impressions and low clicks
This is where it gets useful. Sort by AI impressions. Find your top five pages. Now open your regular Performance report and check the click through rate on those same pages over the last 28 days.
If a page is showing up in a lot of AI answers but your overall clicks are flat or falling, you’ve just confirmed what a lot of business owners suspected. Google is answering the question without sending the person to your site.
You can’t fix that directly. You can’t make Google send the click. But you can decide what to do about the page. If it’s a service page that should be driving inquiries, you might need to target a different search term, one where the person still needs to call or book. If it’s an explainer or FAQ, it’s doing its job. Google citing you is still a trust signal, even if no one clicks.
If a page is showing up in a lot of AI answers but your overall clicks are flat or falling, you’ve just confirmed what a lot of business owners suspected.
Write for the question, not the algorithm
The report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, both of which pull content from pages that directly answer what someone typed. If your plumbing business gets AI impressions for blocked drain Kenmore, your page probably has a clear answer to what causes it and what to do. That’s good.
If you’re not showing up, look at the pages that are. I did this for a client who runs a small physiotherapy practice in Paddington. Her competitor’s page was getting cited because it had a two sentence answer right under the H1. Hers buried the answer in paragraph four under three disclaimers. We moved the answer up. Four weeks later, she had the report and her page was in it.
The format that works is simple. Question as the heading. Two or three sentence answer immediately after. Then the detail. You don’t need to write differently. You need to put the answer where someone scanning the page would see it in three seconds.
Decide whether this data changes anything you’re doing
For most local businesses, it won’t. You were already trying to show up in search. Now you can see whether you’re showing up in the AI part of it. That’s useful, but it doesn’t change the work.
You still need pages that answer what your customers are searching for. You still need your Business Profile up to date, because AI Overviews pull from that too when the search has local intent. You still need reviews, because Google cites businesses with recent, credible social proof.
The report tells you whether it’s working. If your pages aren’t showing up in AI answers for the terms that matter to your business, you know you’ve got a content problem or a relevance problem. If they are showing up but clicks are falling, you know you need to shift to terms where people still need to take action, not just read an answer.
That’s the point of the report. It closes the gap between what you thought was happening and what actually is.
Prompted by Google Search Central Blog.