Did your Search Console generative AI impressions fall off a cliff on August 13? Google says it's a logging bug — and our own web totals show no dent

What Google has confirmed, exactly

Two entries under "Performance reports (Search results / Discover / Google News)" on the data anomalies page, read this run. August 13 (Generative AI in Search): "A logging error caused a decrease in impressions on the Generative AI performance report in Search for data starting on August 13, 2026. This issue affects data logging only and is ongoing." August 13 (Discover and Generative AI in Discover): "A logging error caused a decrease in clicks and impressions on the Discover performance report for data on August 13, 2026. For properties with access to Generative AI features in Discover, this error also caused a decrease in reported impressions." Note the scope: the Search-side error is impressions on the generative AI report, open-ended from August 13; the Discover error is clicks and impressions, one day only. Google's own note says nothing about the regular web performance report.

The reports that prompted the entry were widespread and precise. Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz collected them on August 17: a Google Search Central community thread titled "Seeing a large (50%) decrease in impressions from Generative AI features" starting 8/13; agency owners reporting "almost every client project" showing the same cliff; and Glenn Gabe on X hearing of a clicks drop from around 8/12 while "visibility reporting is stable and analytics shows no drop." That last one matters: Google has confirmed the AI-report impressions error and the one-day Discover error, but has not confirmed any error in web clicks. If your blue-link clicks dipped on the 12th or 13th, check analytics before you file it under this bug. Search Engine Land carried Google's confirmation the same evening.

Our own property across the break: no step down in web totals

Google's help doc for the AI report says its impressions are already included in the Web search type — the AI-surface impressions are inside the `web` totals your API pulls, and there is no way to split them out. So a logging error on the AI report could in principle show up as a dent in web totals too. We pulled `sc-domain:askedabout.com` day by day from the Search Analytics API (`type: web`, data through 2026-08-16, the latest complete day):

Four days after the break average 113.5 impressions a day against 105 for the four before it; August 13 was in fact our first three-click day. Read this for what it is: one small property (~100 impressions a day, so a 20% swing is noise), and a reading of the web line, not the AI report itself, which we cannot pull. It is consistent with Google's scoping — the error is in how the generative AI report is logged, not in the underlying web totals — and it is the one check any agency can run on any client through the API today.

What to tell clients this week

• Do not report the August 13 cliff as a citation loss. The drop is in Google's logging, confirmed in writing, and Google says an annotation is on its way. If a client dashboard screenshots the AI report, annotate it yourself now; a monthly report that shows AI impressions halving from the 13th without a note will be read as a visibility collapse.
• Data from August 13 onward is under-reported until Google says otherwise. The entry is marked ongoing. Google's anomalies page describes previous incidents as logging-only too — a June 24 Discover/AI-in-Discover error and a May 21 Discover error are on the same page — and it does not state whether affected days get restated. Treat the AI report's post-08-13 rows as a floor, not a number, until the entry is closed.
• The report you can't automate is the report that broke. The generative AI report is UI-and-export only, so there is no script that would have flagged this on the 13th; the reports came from people looking at charts. The API-side control — the web line above — is the one thing you can pull per client to show the blue-link totals held.
• Impressions were never recommendations. Even a correctly logged AI-report impression counts a link appearing in an AI Overview or AI Mode; it does not say whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude names the business when a buyer asks. That is the number our free 60-second check reads directly, and it is unaffected by Search Console's logging.