AI search news ·
Google Search Console now counts your AI Overviews impressions — here's the blind spot it leaves
On June 3, 2026, Google added Generative AI performance reports to Search Console, and access is widening through July. For the first time you can see how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It's a real, welcome step — and it's worth being precise about what the report does and does not tell you, because the gap is exactly the part that decides whether AI sends you a customer.
Primary source: Google Search Central
What Google shipped
In its Search Central announcement, dated June 3, 2026, Google introduced a dedicated Generative AI performance view in Search Console. Per Google's help documentation, it covers two AI surfaces on Search:
- AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions, broken down by page, country, device, and date. Google's exact definition: “Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.” (Generative AI in Discover is a separate report.)
- Impressions only — no clicks, no click-through rate, and no query data. The report tells you how often you appeared, not how often anyone clicked, and not which questions surfaced you.
- A rolling global expansion. It first reached a subset of site owners (the UK cohort) and is widening from there through the summer — so most businesses are seeing this data appear in their own console for the first time right about now.
- An AI-features opt-out toggle. Site owners can exclude their pages from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and related features; Google says that control is not used as a ranking signal for standard results.
Why an impression is not a recommendation
The report answers “did a link to my site get shown inside an AI feature?” It does not answer the two questions a business actually cares about: did the model name and recommend me as the answer, and does any of this cover the engines beyond Google? An impression can be a passing citation in a list of ten sources the AI pulled from — not the business it told the user to call. And AI Overviews / AI Mode are Google surfaces only. The buyer asking ChatGPT “best med spa in Austin,” or Perplexity “which law firm should I call,” or Claude for a shortlist, generates nothing in Search Console at all. In our 1,120-answer engine comparison, the four engines disagreed sharply about who to recommend — so a business can look fine in Google's new report and still be invisible on the engine its customers actually use.
We see the gap in our own numbers. AskedAbout has 67 Search Console impressions over the last 28 days and, in our public weekly self-audit, exactly 0 model recommendations across 144 answers. Impressions and recommendations are two different channels, and the new report only instruments one of them — the Google one, at the impression level.
The takeaway
Turn the new Search Console report on and watch it — it's the first native signal that Google's AI features are showing your pages, and it's free. Just don't mistake it for the whole picture. To know whether AI recommends you — and to cover ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, not just Google — you have to ask the engines the questions your buyers ask and count how often your name comes back. You can do that by hand in about fifteen minutes, or run a free 60-second check that samples ChatGPT and Perplexity (the $79 audit adds Gemini and Claude, 25 questions sampled three times each) and reports your recommendation rate, not just your impressions.
See your number
A free 60-second check shows what AI says about you.
Running this for clients? The $249 agency 5-pack audits five businesses, white-labeled.
Who runs this
- Built and operated by Sensara LLC, Atlanta, Georgia — about us and how the audit works.
- See what the report looks like before you run anything — score per engine, the competitors AI names instead of you, and a fix plan.
- We run the same audit on ourselves every week and publish the result: in the latest run AI named AskedAbout in 1 of 144 answers. We report our own numbers the way we report yours.