Google has completed the worldwide rollout of new Search Console reporting designed to show website owners when their pages appear in Google's generative AI search features.
The company confirmed on 31 August 2026 that the features, first tested with a subset of UK website owners in June, have now been rolled out to websites worldwide. The change gives businesses a clearer view of whether their content is being surfaced in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover.
What Google has added to Search Console
Google's new generative AI performance reports focus on impressions, which record when a link to a website is shown within a supported AI feature. The Search report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, while Google provides a separate report for generative AI features in Discover.
Website owners can see which pages are receiving AI impressions and examine the data by date and country. The Search report can also break impressions down by device. This separates information that was previously much harder to identify from Google's wider search performance data.
The rollout also includes a Search Console control that allows a website owner to include or exclude a site from Google's generative AI search features. Google says opting out prevents the site's links and content from appearing in those features, but the setting is not used as a ranking signal for conventional search results outside them.
Why the new visibility data matters
For businesses, one of the difficulties created by AI-assisted search has been measurement. A company may know that Google is increasingly answering questions through AI-generated responses, but understanding whether its own website is actually being included has been far less straightforward.
The new reports provide a direct indicator of that visibility. A business can begin to see whether particular pages are appearing in Google's AI experiences, how frequently they are being shown and where those impressions are coming from.
That does not establish the commercial value of an appearance on its own. An impression does not tell a business whether somebody subsequently became a customer, made an enquiry or even visited the website. It does, however, provide a new piece of evidence for organisations already monitoring organic search visibility and website performance.
There are still limits to what businesses can measure
The reporting is not yet equivalent to the familiar Search Console performance reports used for conventional search analysis. Google's documentation describes impression reporting rather than a separate click metric for the new generative AI reports, so businesses cannot currently use them to measure AI-search visits and click-through rates in the same way.
There is also a rollout wrinkle. Although Google's 31 August update says the features have been rolled out to websites worldwide, its Search Console help pages still state that some properties may not see the reports. Google says this can happen during the rollout or when a site has not received enough impressions from generative AI features.
That makes the absence of a report difficult to interpret in isolation. It should not automatically be treated as evidence that a website never appears in AI search.
A clearer starting point for AI search reporting
The update does not change the fundamentals of search visibility overnight, and it does not provide a complete picture of how AI-generated answers influence customer journeys. It does give website owners something they have been missing: dedicated data showing whether their pages are appearing inside Google's AI search experiences.
For companies already reviewing search visibility through analytics, Search Console or a website audit, the new figures can now sit alongside existing measures rather than AI visibility being treated largely as an assumption.
Google says it plans to introduce additional metrics over time. For now, the 31 August rollout turns one part of AI search visibility into something businesses can begin to observe and compare rather than simply speculate about.
