Search Console now counts your AI impressions worldwide, but not the clicks

Google finished rolling out Search Console's generative AI performance reports to every website worldwide on August 31, and made the switch that removes a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode globally available on the same day. Both had been trickling out since June. Google confirmed the date in a note appended to its original announcement and to the help pages for both features: "As of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide."

For people marketing software, this is the first Google-native answer to a question settled by vendor estimates for two years: how often does our content actually appear inside an AI answer. It is an answer with a hole in the middle of it.

What the report counts, and what it refuses to

The reports were introduced on June 3 by Hillel Maoz and Moshe Samet of the Search Console team, initially to a test group of UK site owners. There are two: one for Search, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode, and one for Discover. Both break down by page, country and date; the Search version adds desktop, tablet and mobile. Search Labs experiment data is excluded.

The metric is impressions, and only impressions. Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz wrote that the reporting "does not include click data" — the report tells you your page was shown as a source, not that anyone came. Search Engine Journal's Matt G. Southern added the regulatory context: the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which issued a conduct requirement the same June day the reports were announced, has given Google until March 2027 to ship page-level controls and expects click-through data. Monday's updates said nothing about clicks. Note the vendor angle — Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush, which sells AI-visibility tracking this free report partly duplicates.

Two details matter more than they look. Impressions are assigned to the canonical URL, so if your documentation canonicalises somewhere you do not own as a separate property, the data lands where you are not looking. And in the Search report's chart, two results from the same site in one AI feature count as a single impression. This is a reach count, not a citation count.

The opt-out is all-or-nothing, and it inherits

The control sits under Settings with three states: include, exclude, or inherit from the parent property. Include is the default. Excluding removes your links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI in Discover, and Google is explicit that a site which opts out receives no traffic and no impressions from those surfaces. Changes take one to two days to propagate. The control is not a ranking signal elsewhere in Search and does not affect AI model training — that is the separate Google-Extended control.

Publishers have wanted this switch since AI Overviews launched. Most software companies should not touch it. A publisher loses a pageview when an AI Overview answers the question; a software company loses much less, because the question is usually "what tool does X" and the answer names products. That citation is closer to a placement than a theft.

Opting out does not remove the answer. It removes you from it.

The bigger constraint is granularity. Until the page-level controls the CMA has mandated arrive, exclusion is per property, so you cannot keep your comparison pages in AI Overviews while pulling your pricing page out. Worse, a child property inherits its parent's setting by default, so toggling exclusion on the domain property silently applies it to the docs subfolder and the blog. That is a change one person makes in a settings pane and nobody notices until impressions hit zero.

What to do with this in the next week

The report starts producing history the day you start reading it, and Search Console's usual limits — a 1,000-row table, a bounded date window — mean the baseline you do not export now is one you do not get.

• Export Pages-dimension impressions weekly and keep the file. Google's newest data is preliminary and can revise within hours.
• Join AI impressions per page against organic clicks per page for the same window. Pages with climbing impressions and flat clicks are being read, not visited — rework those around a reason to click, not more prose.
• Check which property owns the canonical for your docs, changelog and comparison pages before you conclude a section has no AI visibility.
• Audit the Search generative AI control on every property today and write down its state. Inheritance makes this a change that travels.
• Stop reporting AI visibility as a revenue proxy internally. Until Google adds clicks it is a reach metric, and pitching it as pipeline sets a trap for next quarter.

The strategic read is duller than the announcement. Google has given every site a free, credible impression count for AI surfaces and withheld the one number that would let anyone value them. That asymmetry has the same shape as the AI Overview itself: it shows the source and keeps the session. Proof of what a citation is worth remains a 2027 problem.