For about two years, the honest answer to “are we showing up in AI Overviews?” was a shrug. You could screenshot a handful of queries, pay for a third-party tracker and make an educated guess. Search Console itself couldn’t separate AI features from ordinary results.
That’s over. Google says that as of August 31, 2026, every Search Console property in the world has access to its new generative AI performance reports. Alongside them sits a setting that lets you pull your entire site out of Google’s AI features with a couple of clicks.
The report is genuinely useful. The opt-out is a switch most businesses will be tempted to flip for the wrong reasons. Let’s go through both.
What changed, and why now
Google announced the reports and the opt-out together on June 3, 2026, starting with a small group of website owners in the UK. The timing wasn’t an accident. On the same day, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a conduct requirement obliging Google to let websites opt out of AI search features without being penalized in regular search.
The control started appearing outside the UK in July. Google then added a note to its documentation saying the rollout reached all websites worldwide on August 31.
One caveat. Google’s help pages still describe access as rolling out, and sites with too few AI impressions may not see a report at all. If yours is missing, the likeliest explanation is that AI features rarely show your pages yet.
Where to find it
Open Search Console and go to Performance. Depending on your account, you’ll see a Generative AI view either as its own item under Performance or tucked inside Search results. There’s a separate one for Discover. Both are labeled Beta, which is a fair description of what you’re getting.
What the report shows, and what it leaves out
The report counts impressions from three places: AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. You can break those impressions down by page, country and date. The Search version adds a device breakdown too.
What it doesn’t give you matters just as much. There’s no click data. There are no queries. And AI Overviews and AI Mode are rolled into a single number, so you can’t tell which of the two surfaced your page.
Put simply, you can now see that a page appeared inside an AI answer. You still can’t see who clicked through from it, or what they asked to get there.
One thing that’s easy to miss: these AI impressions aren’t kept apart from everything else. They’re counted in your main Performance report too. So if your impressions line has been creeping up for months while clicks just sit there, some of that climb is probably AI Overviews and AI Mode. Now you can actually check.
How to actually use it
Start a baseline now
Export the page-level data this month and keep it. When Google eventually adds clicks (the CMA expects it to), you’ll want months of impression history to compare against. Nobody can go back and export last October later.
Compare AI impressions with your normal page data
Line the two reports up and a pattern usually shows up fast. Some pages pick up loads of AI impressions, yet organic clicks on those same pages keep sliding. In most of those cases, people are reading the AI answer and moving on. Adding more words won’t fix it. Give the page something a summary can’t do for the reader. A cost calculator, say. Or actual prices, or numbers from your own projects.
Then there’s the opposite problem. A page sits on page one in regular results and gets almost nothing from AI features. When you dig in, the answer is often hiding. Three paragraphs of preamble before the point, or the useful bit tucked inside an accordion. Move it up. Write it as a plain sentence someone could quote.
Check the country split
Check the country tab properly. AI Mode didn’t arrive everywhere at once. English came first, and languages like Hindi and Japanese followed months later. How often AI Overviews appear differs a lot by market too. So if you’ve got clients in Australia, the US and India, look at each one on its own. AI visibility might matter a lot in one and hardly at all in another.
Pair it with long queries in the main report
Since the AI report won’t tell you queries, go back to the regular Performance report. Add a query filter, pick Custom (regex) and paste in ^(\S+\s+){7,}\S+$. You’ll only see searches of eight words or more. Honestly, a lot of them read like someone talking to ChatGPT, not typing into Google. That’s exactly the kind of search where an AI answer tends to show up. Read through them properly. They’re often surprisingly specific.
This is Google’s data, nothing else
One more thing. ChatGPT isn’t in here. Neither is Perplexity, or the Gemini app. This is Google Search and Discover, full stop. Want to know what those other tools say about your brand? You’ll need to ask them yourself, or pay for a tool that does it for you.
About that opt-out switch
You’ll find it in Search Console under Settings. Look for a page called Search generative AI. Choosing to exclude your site removes its links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover. Google is clear about the consequence: sites that opt out won’t receive impressions or traffic from those features.
A few points are easy to get wrong:
- It isn’t a ranking signal. According to Google, flipping it won’t change how your pages rank in normal results. Your blue links and snippets should stay put.
- It doesn’t affect AI training. Whether Google can use your content to train its models is governed by a different control, Google-Extended.
- It doesn’t touch other AI tools. ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest are outside its reach.
- It works at the property level. Child properties inherit the setting from their parent unless you change them individually, and page-level control isn’t available yet.
Before this toggle existed, the only way to keep content out of AI Overviews was the nosnippet family of directives. The catch was that nosnippet also removed your snippet from ordinary results. The new control separates the two, which is the main reason it’s an improvement.
Why most sites should leave it alone
The case against opting out comes down to one problem: you’d be making the decision blind. The report shows impressions with no clicks attached, so you can’t put a value on what you’d be giving up. Opting out means trading an unknown amount of visibility for an unknown benefit.
The property-level scope makes it worse. If one section of your site is being summarized in a way you don’t like, opting out removes your blog, your service pages and everything else along with it.
There may also be side effects that aren’t obvious yet. At least one SEO has suggested the opt-out could remove publishers from Top Stories shown inside AI Overviews, a placement Google never marketed as an AI feature. That hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s the kind of thing you’d only discover after the fact.
There are reasonable exceptions. A publisher whose licensing deals require exclusive use of its content may need to opt out. So might a site with clear evidence that AI answers are replacing visits it depends on, such as some reference and recipe sites. Even then, I’d want a few months of baseline data before making the change.
A quick check before you touch the toggle
- Look at the report first. If your AI impressions are tiny, the decision barely matters either way.
- Identify which pages carry those impressions, and whether they’re pages you want people to find.
- Confirm how your Search Console properties are structured, so you know exactly what a property-level change will cover.
- Write down the date and your current numbers, so you can measure what happened afterwards.
What’s coming next
This is version one, and the regulator has already set out more. Under the CMA’s timeline, Google has until March 2027 to introduce page-level controls for generative AI features. The CMA is also expecting click-through data, though Google hasn’t announced it yet. Google has to report on its compliance every six months during the first year.
Page-level controls and click data together would change the opt-out decision completely. You’d be able to exclude one problem section while keeping everything else, and you’d finally know what AI visibility is worth in visits. Until then, collecting data is the sensible move and flipping switches isn’t.
FAQ
Will opting out hurt my normal Google rankings?
Google says no. The setting isn’t used as a ranking signal outside the AI features it covers, so regular results and snippets shouldn’t change.
Does opting out stop Google training AI on my content?
No. Training is controlled separately through Google-Extended. The Search Console setting only covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover.
Why can’t I see the Generative AI report?
Either your property hasn’t received it yet, or your site doesn’t have enough impressions in AI features for Google to show one.
Does the report show clicks from AI Overviews?
Not yet. It currently shows impressions only, with no click or query data.
The bottom line
For the first time, Google is telling you directly where your pages turn up in its AI answers. Use it. Save a baseline this month, then go after the pages that should be showing up in AI answers and aren’t.
As for the opt-out, I’d keep my site included unless there’s a clear, written-down reason to pull it. The data you’d need to make that call properly just isn’t in the report yet.
Want help working out what your Generative AI report is telling you? Get in touch with SearchEngineCore and we’ll take a look.
Sanjeev Kumar is a digital marketing expert with over 14 years of experience in SEO, PPC, content marketing, and online growth strategies. He specializes in search engine optimization, AI-driven marketing, and digital strategy for businesses and agencies worldwide.
