For two years, SEOs have watched traffic drain into AI answers with no official way to measure it. Google just handed over a measuring stick with half the markings rubbed off.

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Google confirmed that as of August 31, 2026, both the generative AI performance report and the AI control are available on all websites worldwide. The rollout started in the first week of June and moved slowly, which is why access has been patchy for months.

If you saw the report on one property but not another, that gap should be closed now. You will find it as an expandable tab inside your main Performance report in Search Console, not as a separate section in the sidebar.

If it still isn't showing, the most likely reason is data volume. Google's AI features haven't pulled your pages often enough to have anything worth reporting yet.

The report isolates how often your pages turned up inside Google's generative AI features. Here is the full set of dimensions:

An impression here means one thing: your URL was present in an AI answer. That is a real number, and until now nobody had it.

"Impressions tell you that you showed up. They don't tell you whether showing up did anything."

The report leaves out click data and query data. That is the part worth being annoyed about.

Without query data, you can't see which questions pulled your page into an AI answer. That makes it very hard to work out what to write more of, or less of.

Without click data, you can't size the value of the impressions you're getting. You know you were cited. You don't know if a single person came back to your site because of it.

So treat this report as a visibility signal, not a traffic report. Pair it with whatever you already use to catch referral traffic from AI tools.

Alongside the report, Google rolled out a toggle that lets site owners block their content from generative AI features. That covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover.

It applies to two separate things: showing your pages as links inside AI answers, and using your content to ground those answers. Grounding means feeding your content to the model so it can build a response from it.

Google has said that sites which opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from these AI features, and that the setting is not used as a ranking signal in regular search results. So the trade is a real one, but it is contained to the AI surfaces.

Open the report, export what's there, and write the number down. Once you have a starting point, every future change means something.

The raw AI number on its own is hard to read. Sitting next to your overall Search impressions, it tells you how much of your visibility now lives inside AI answers.

Most sites should leave the toggle alone. But if your business model depends on people landing on your pages rather than reading a summary of them, this is worth an actual conversation instead of a default.

Did You Know? This rollout took nearly three months. Google started shipping the generative AI reports in the first week of June and didn't finish reaching every site worldwide until August 31.

Google gave us the number that is easiest to give and hardest to argue with. Impressions are cheap to report and they don't reveal much about what AI answers are doing to click behavior.

I don't think that's malice. Query and click data in AI surfaces is genuinely messier to define than it is in a list of blue links.

But it does mean the industry gets to keep arguing about AI's traffic impact with slightly better vibes and still no receipts. I'll take the impressions. I'd rather have the clicks.

Till next time,

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