Search Console AI report: read it before you opt out of AI Overviews

On 31 August 2026 Google finished rolling out two things to every Search Console property: a generative AI performance report, and a switch that removes your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Discover. Most of what has been written since asks whether you should flip the switch. For a business whose website exists to win enquiries, the Search Console AI report matters more than the switch. The report is the first list Google has ever given you of the pages its AI answers link to. Read that list against the pages that bring you work, find out who actually controls the switch on your domain, and write your decision down with a date to revisit it.

TL;DR: The Search Console AI report counts how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date, with no clicks and no queries. Leave the default setting on, compare the cited pages with the pages that bring enquiries, and make sure the domain property belongs to your business.

What the Search Console AI report shows

Google's generative AI performance report answers one question an owner could not answer before: is Google using my pages in its AI answers, and which ones? It counts impressions: each time a link to one of your URLs was shown inside an AI feature on Google Search. Google announced it on 3 June 2026, tested it on a subset of sites, and finished the worldwide rollout on 31 August. You can group the count by page, country, device and date, and separate typed searches from image searches made with Google Lens or Circle to Search.

The report leaves out most of what an owner wants to know. There is no query, so you cannot see what someone asked when your page appeared. There are no clicks, no click-through rate and no position inside the answer. A month of impressions on your service page tells you Google used the page, and nothing about whether anyone came.

One quirk catches people on the first visit. The chart counts once per property, so two of your pages in one answer make one impression, while the table counts per page. The totals will not match, and that is expected.

Should you switch off AI Overviews for your site?

For most businesses that sell a service or a product, no. Google's own help page for the control gives the reason: if you exclude your site, "content from other sites will still be available in those features, and it may appear similar to yours." The question a buyer typed does not go away when you leave. Someone asking AI Mode for an accountant in Porto who handles non-resident tax still gets an answer. It just names a different accountant.

The case for leaving is narrow. It fits a business whose product is the information itself, such as a paid research service or a training provider, where a summary gives away what a reader used to pay for. For a clinic, a studio or a shop, a citation without a click is annoying. Losing the citation as well is worse.

Two facts stop owners from pulling the wrong lever. The control is not a ranking signal, and Google says it does not affect your ordinary results. It also has nothing to do with AI training. Training runs through a separate robots.txt token, Google-Extended, which many sites set in the belief that it kept them out of AI Overviews. It never did; the difference between training bots and answer bots is its own decision. Leaving Google Search entirely is a third tool, noindex, and a much bigger call. Our own robots.txt at sharphaw.com allows every crawler, Google-Extended included, and blocks only the API routes.

Which pages is Google citing, and are they the ones that sell?

Use the report for one comparison. Open the Pages tab and compare the last four weeks with the four before, since AI features trigger unevenly from day to day. Put that list next to the pages that produce enquiries: the service pages, the booking page, and the pages your analytics shows people reading just before they fill in the contact form.

Two mismatches are worth looking for.

Google cites an old blog post or FAQ, and never the service page. The service page probably answers the same question less plainly. Move the specific answer near the top in ordinary text: what you do, for whom, in which area, and how someone books. Those are the facts an AI answer can quote, and a page that buries them under a slogan gives Google nothing to lift.

Google cites the pages that sell, and enquiries from search are falling. This is the case the report cannot settle, because it has no clicks. Set the AI impressions for those pages beside their Google organic visits and enquiries in your analytics, keeping in mind that some AI referrals arrive labelled as direct. If AI impressions climb while visits fall over the same weeks, on the same pages, and the standard Performance report shows their rankings holding, the answer is probably being given on Google's page. The page's job then is to make the click worth it with something a summary cannot hand over, such as a booking slot or a quote form.

Check the Devices tab while you are there. If most AI impressions are on mobile, the page those people land on has to be quick and readable on a phone.

Who controls the AI switch on your domain?

Each property inherits its setting from the one above it. By default every property follows the closest parent property that has set its own choice, and at the top sits the domain property, the one verified for your whole domain through a DNS record: one setting for every subdomain and subfolder beneath it. In the property picker, a domain property shows the bare domain (example.com); a URL-prefix property shows a full address starting https://. A child property, such as https://example.com/blog/, can override its parent, and the owner of the domain property sees a notice when one does.

Search Console properties pile up over the years. One was verified by the developer who built the first site, another was added by an SEO supplier, a third covers the subdomain of a booking tool. Each owner can set the switch for their slice of your site, and some of those people no longer work with you. Open every property you can reach, look at Settings and then Users and permissions, and check two things. The domain property should be verified under a Google account your business owns. No older property should override it without a reason somebody can still explain.

Under SharpHaw's terms the domain belongs to the client, so the Search Console domain property should sit in the client's Google account too, with the supplier added as a user. The same goes for any supplier you work with, because whoever owns that property decides whether your business appears in Google's AI answers.

What should you write down before you decide?

The switch is cheap to reverse. Google says an exclusion takes effect within one to two days of going live, longer for cached content. A decision nobody recorded costs more, because in six months nobody will remember why the site vanished from AI Mode. Write four lines wherever you keep notes on the website:

• the date you checked, and the setting you found on each property;
• the pages the report says Google cites, and the pages that bring enquiries;
• what you decided, and why;
• the date you will look again.

Put that date in December. The UK Competition and Markets Authority has required Google to share click and click-through data for its AI features, with most of those measures due to start in December, and page-level controls by March 2027. Until clicks arrive, you are weighing impressions against nothing, which is a good reason to give the decision a review date.

Frequently asked questions

Does the UK ruling on AI data cover sites outside the UK?

The report and the switch already cover every site worldwide, according to Google's help pages. The click data is different: the Competition and Markets Authority's requirement is a UK obligation, and Google has not said whether those figures will reach every country. Check your own report in December.

Where is the switch, and what is it set to now?

In Search Console, under Settings, then Search generative AI. Every property starts on include. A property with a parent above it starts on inherit, which means it follows the closest parent that has made its own choice, ending at the domain property.

Why can't I see the generative AI report in Search Console?

Google says the report usually stays hidden when a site has not had enough impressions in AI features to show anything. It can also mean the site, or a parent property above it, is set to exclude. Check the Search generative AI setting before assuming the data is missing.

Can I see which searches triggered my AI impressions?

Not yet. The report groups impressions by page, country, device and date, with no query dimension and no click data. The nearest substitute is to read each cited page, note the question it answers best, and compare that with the queries the same page earns in the standard Performance report.

The short version

The Search Console AI report will not tell you whether AI answers are costing you enquiries. It does tell you which of your pages Google quotes, which is enough to start work. Make the pages that sell as quotable as the pages that get cited, put the domain property in your own name, and date your decision for December. If you want to talk through what your report shows and which pages to fix first, book a 30-minute call.