How to See Your AI Overviews Data in Search Console

To see how often your site appears in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, open Google Search Console, pick your site and go to the Generative AI performance report under Performance. It shows how many times links to your pages were shown in those AI answers, broken down by page, country, device and date. It counts impressions, not clicks, and if the report is missing, either your site hasn't had enough AI impressions yet or it has been excluded under Settings > Search generative AI. Checking both takes about ten minutes.

Why this is worth a look now#

Google announced the reports on 3 June 2026 for a small group of sites, then rolled them out to all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026. On 24 September it added a multimodal search filter, so you can now also see how your pages do when people search with a photo instead of typing.

That means most small-business sites now have a few months of AI data waiting in an account they rarely open. It's a good moment to look, especially before the busy run-up to Christmas, when you'll want to know which pages Google is already putting in front of people.

If you haven't set up Search Console yet, do that first: the Search Console section of our launch checklist walks through verifying your site and submitting a sitemap. Data only starts collecting once the site is verified.

Step 1: Open the report#

1. Sign in to Search Console and choose your property from the menu at the top left. A domain property (for example example.com) covers every version of your site, so pick that if you have one.
2. In the left-hand menu, open Performance and look for the Generative AI report. You can also go straight to it with Google's direct link to the Generative AI performance report.
3. If you publish news or articles that appear in Google Discover, there's a separate report for Discover too.

According to Google's help page for the report, it currently covers two features: AI Overviews (the AI summary at the top of some results pages) and AI Mode (the conversational search tab). Experiments in Search Labs aren't included. Google says it expects to add features to the list over time.

Step 2: Understand what the numbers mean#

The report shows impressions: how many times a link to your site was shown to someone in an AI Overview or in AI Mode. At the time of writing it doesn't show clicks, click-through rate or position, which is the biggest difference from the normal Search results report. Google's launch post says it may add more metrics later.

A few details make the numbers easier to trust:

• The chart counts your site once per answer. If two of your pages appear in the same AI Overview, the chart counts one impression for the site. The table, when grouped by page, counts each page separately, so the table's total can be higher than the chart's. Google's explanation of property vs page aggregation has a worked example.
• Pages are canonical URLs. Impressions are credited to the final URL after redirects, and usually to the page's canonical URL rather than a duplicate. If you moved pages recently, look for them under their new address.
• Dates are in Pacific Time. A "day" in the report runs on US Pacific Time, so the edges of each day won't line up exactly with UK time.
• The newest data is provisional. The latest few hours are drawn as a dotted line and can still change.
• AI impressions also appear in the main report. Google says this data is still included in the overall Performance report; the Generative AI report is a separate view of it, not extra traffic on top.

Step 3: Find out which pages Google uses#

The table under the chart has tabs for the four ways you can group the data:

Start with Pages and set the date range to the last three months. For a small business, the useful questions are simple:

• Are your money pages there? If your services, menu, prices or opening hours pages appear, Google is using them to answer questions about you. If only your blog posts appear, your main pages may be thin on detail.
• Is anything out of date? A page that gets AI impressions is a page Google is quoting. If it lists last year's prices or old opening times, fix it first. Our post on adding holiday opening hours covers keeping times consistent across your site and Google.
• Are local searches finding you? The Countries tab is a quick sanity check that your impressions come from where your customers are.

Then open the Search results performance report for the same pages and dates. That report does show clicks, so you can see whether pages that appear often in AI answers are also getting visits.

Step 4: Check image searches with the multimodal filter#

The filter at the top of the report lets you choose a search type:

• Web: text-based: searches typed into the normal Google search bar.
• Web: multimodal: searches where someone used an image, including Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, uploading an image to Google, and Chrome's "Search this image".

Multimodal matters more than it sounds for small businesses: think of someone photographing a shop front, a dish, a product or a broken boiler part. If your multimodal numbers are tiny, good photos on the right pages are an easy win. Google's own guide to optimising for generative AI features recommends supporting your text with high-quality, relevant images and video where it makes sense, and says its normal image SEO advice already covers this. In practice that means real photos instead of stock ones, descriptive file names and useful alt text.

Step 5: Export the data#

Click Export to download both the chart and table as a spreadsheet. Two things to know: values shown as ~ or - in the report become zeros in the download, and the table is limited to 1,000 rows, the same as the normal performance reports. For most small sites neither is a problem.

A simple habit is to export once a month and keep the files in one folder. A running spreadsheet makes it easy to see whether a page you rewrote started appearing more often.

If the report is missing or empty#

Google's help page gives two reasons for not seeing the report:

1. Not enough impressions yet. New or very small sites may not have appeared in AI answers often enough for the report to show. Keep improving your main pages and check again in a few weeks.
2. Your site is excluded. Open Settings > Search generative AI (or the Search generative AI control page) and check which option is selected.

The Search generative AI control has three settings:

• Include my site's links and content in Search generative AI features: the default.
• Exclude my site's links and content from Search generative AI features: your pages won't appear or be linked in AI Overviews, AI Mode or Discover's AI features, and you'll get no impressions or traffic from them.
• Inherit control from parent: the default for smaller properties nested under a bigger one, such as a https://example.com/blog/ property inside example.com.

Google says changing the setting takes effect in a few days, usually within one to two, though some content can take longer. It also says the control isn't a ranking signal for the rest of Search and doesn't affect AI training; that is controlled separately with the Google-Extended crawler token. If someone else set up your Search Console, it's worth checking that nobody switched this off by accident.

The pages themselves also have to be eligible. Google's guide says a page must be indexed and allowed to show a snippet in normal Search results. If you've added nosnippet or a noindex tag to a page, it won't appear in AI answers either.

What not to bother with#

Google's optimisation guide is direct about some popular advice: Google Search doesn't use llms.txt files or other special "AI" markup, so adding them neither helps nor harms your visibility on Google. It also says you don't need to break pages into tiny chunks, and that churning out pages for every variation of a question can breach its scaled content abuse spam policy.

What does help is the same work as normal SEO: a page per service with real detail, clear headings, accurate prices and hours, and your own photos. Our SEO docs cover the titles, descriptions, sitemaps and structured data every Freeframe template ships with, and the Handy and Bistro templates are built around the kind of service, menu and opening-hours pages that AI answers like to quote.

A ten-minute monthly routine#

1. Open the Generative AI report, set the last 28 days, and note the total impressions.
2. Check the Pages tab for anything out of date and fix it.
3. Switch the search type to Web: multimodal and see which pages people reach from photos.
4. Compare the same pages in the Search results report for clicks.
5. Export and save the file.

That's enough to spot problems early without turning AI search into a second job.