# Search Console shows AI impressions now. Read what it doesn’t show.

The generative AI performance report gives you impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. It gives you no clicks, no position, and no API. That shapes what you can honestly conclude from it.

Published: 2026-08-20T10:00:00.000Z

Canonical: https://thatseoagent.com/en/blog/search-console-ai-impressions

For two years the most common question in this field had no answer: is any of our traffic
coming from AI Overviews? Search Console now answers a version of it. The generative AI
performance report shows how often links to your site appeared in generative AI features on
Google Search, and there is a matching report for Discover.

It is a genuine improvement, and it is narrower than the conversation around it. Worth
reading the shape of it carefully before anyone builds a slide out of it.

## What the report contains

Impressions. That is the metric.

The help documentation defines it as how many times links to your site were shown to a user
in a generative AI feature on Google Search, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode. Clicks are
not part of the report. Neither is average position, which would not mean much inside a
generated answer anyway.

Everything else in it is the familiar Search Console apparatus: pages, devices, countries,
dates. The data is also folded into the overall performance report, so your existing totals
already contained it — this report separates it out rather than adding it.

## Four things it cannot tell you

**Whether anyone came.** An impression is your link being present in an answer. Without
clicks in the report, the question everyone actually has — did being cited send us anybody —
is not in there. The overall performance report still holds your clicks; what you cannot do
is attribute them to the AI surface.

**Which surface.** AI Overviews and AI Mode are both counted. They are very different
experiences with very different intent, and a single impressions line does not separate the
person who glanced at a summary from the person who is holding a conversation.

**Whether the number is final.** Google states the newest data can be preliminary, meaning
still being collected and subject to change. Reading week-over-week movement off the last few
days is reading noise.

**Whether you are seeing all of it.** The report is rolling out to a subset of properties,
your site needs enough impressions in those features to appear at all, Search Labs
experiments are excluded, and the usual 1,000-row limit applies. Google also notes chart
totals can differ from table totals because of how aggregation works.

## And there is no API for it yet

This is the part that matters if you do anything programmatic, and it is easy to miss because
it is stated by omission rather than by announcement.

The Search Analytics API documents six values for its search type filter: `web`, `image`,
`video`, `news`, `googleNews` and `discover`. None of them is a generative AI surface, and
the report's own documentation does not mention API access. So for now this is a report you
read in the interface, not a series you can pull, join to your own data, or watch on a
schedule.

Practically: if you want the AI impressions trend beside your clicks, somebody is exporting
it by hand. Design your reporting around that, and do not promise a dashboard the platform
does not have an endpoint for.

## What to do with it anyway

Use it as a presence check, not a performance metric. The honest reading of a rising
impressions line is “we are being cited more often”, and the honest reading of a falling one
is “we are being cited less often”. Both are worth knowing. Neither is revenue.

Then note which pages carry it. Impressions concentrated on a handful of URLs tells you what
Google currently treats as your quotable material, and that is a real signal about the shape
of your content — one you can compare against what you thought your important pages were.

The eligibility rule underneath all of this has not changed and is worth keeping in view: a
page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet before it can appear in these features at
all. A page that
[was fetched and not kept](/en/blog/crawled-is-not-indexed) is not in this report, and no amount
of AI-specific work puts it there.

## Frequently asked questions

:::faq
### Does the report include clicks from AI Overviews?
No. The generative AI performance report is impressions only. Your clicks are still in the
overall performance report, but they are not attributed to the AI surface there.

### Is AI Mode separated from AI Overviews?
Both are covered by the report. Google's documentation lists them as the generative AI
capabilities included; it does not describe them as separately reportable metrics, so treat a
figure as covering both unless your own interface shows otherwise.

### Can I get this through the Search Console API?
Not through a documented generative AI search type. The API's search type filter lists `web`,
`image`, `video`, `news`, `googleNews` and `discover`, and the report's documentation says
nothing about API availability. Assume manual export until Google says otherwise.

### My property has no such report. Why?
Two documented reasons. It is rolling out to a subset of properties, and a site needs enough
impressions in generative AI features to be shown data at all. A third worth checking: if the
site has been excluded from generative AI features using the Search Console control, there
will be nothing to report.

### Why do the chart and the table disagree?
Google documents this: chart totals can differ from table totals because of how the data is
aggregated. It is not a bug on your end, and it is a reason not to quote a single figure to
two decimal places.
:::

## Sources

- [Generative AI performance report (Search)](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139) — the metric, the surfaces covered, and every limitation quoted above
- [Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports) — the announcement and the staged rollout
- [Search Analytics: query — Search Console API](https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/v1/searchanalytics/query) — the documented search type values
- [AI features and your website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) — the indexed-and-snippet-eligible requirement