As of August 31, 2026, Google completed a global rollout of two new Search Console AI features: a dedicated AI performance report showing how your content appears inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a toggle that lets site owners opt their entire property out of generative AI Search features. Both have been in limited testing since June 2026. Now every Search Console account worldwide has access.
What Did Google Just Add to Search Console?
Google updated its official documentation on August 31, 2026 to confirm global availability, according to Search Engine Land. The rollout covers two separate tools: the AI performance report, which gives site owners a dedicated view of their impressions inside Google’s generative AI features, and the Search generative AI control, a toggle under Settings that manages whether a site’s content appears in those features at all.
The context: AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly users, according to blog.google. As a growing share of searches are answered by generative AI features rather than a traditional blue-link results page, site owners have had limited visibility into how their content performs inside those experiences. The new report addresses that gap directly.
What Does the AI Performance Report Actually Show?
The report, launched in Search Console in June 2026 and now available to all users globally, tracks how URLs from your site appear within generative AI features on Google Search and Discover. According to developers.google.com, the report includes the following data dimensions:
- Impressions: How often your URLs appeared in AI Overviews, AI Mode, or generative AI features in Discover.
- Pages: Which specific URLs appeared within AI features.
- Countries: Your visibility broken down by country.
- Devices: Which devices users were on when seeing your site (available for Search results).
- Dates: Performance over time, with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity.
One significant gap: the report does not include click data, as confirmed by Search Engine Land. You can see how often your content appears inside AI responses, but not how many users clicked through to your site from those appearances. Google noted it is continuing to work with website owners on what additional metrics would be most useful, per developers.google.com.
How Does the Opt-Out Toggle Work?
The “Search generative AI control,” found in Search Console under Settings, gives site owners three options, per support.google.com. The default for all properties is inclusion.
- Include: Your content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover, both as links and as grounding material (source content that an AI response draws on to generate its answer). This is the default.
- Exclude: Your content is blocked from appearing in generative AI features. You will not receive traffic or impressions from these features.
- Inherit from parent: Your property follows the control setting of its parent property. Changes at the parent level apply automatically, but you can override at any time.
Several caveats apply, per Google’s documentation (support.google.com):
- Opting out is not a ranking signal for regular (non-AI) search results. Standard organic rankings are not affected.
- This control does not affect AI training. To limit training of Google’s AI models, a separate mechanism, Google-Extended, handles that.
- Once you change the control, exclusion generally takes a few days to take full effect. Most content is excluded within 1 to 2 days after the control goes live.
- This control does not affect other Google services like Merchant Center or Google Ads.
What This Means for AI-Search Visibility
The core thing to understand: appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode is not the same as getting a click, and Google’s new report makes this gap visible for the first time.
Think of it this way. If a customer asks a question through Google and an AI response answers it by citing your content as a source, that citation shapes the customer’s perception of your authority, even if they never click through to your site. Impressions in AI Overviews represent moments when Google chose to surface your content as trusted input. The current report shows how often that happens. What it cannot yet show is whether it drives meaningful traffic.
This creates a practical problem for decision-making. Site owners now know how often their content appears in AI responses, but not what happens next. Conclusions about whether AI appearances drive value should be held loosely until click data becomes available, or until you can triangulate with direct and referral traffic patterns over time.
On the opt-out decision, Hingewise’s assessment is that this is a significant trade-off for most publishers, not a neutral housekeeping choice. Sites that opt out lose both impressions and traffic from generative AI features. Google confirms exclusion is not a ranking penalty for standard search results. But share of voice in AI-generated answers, meaning how consistently your brand appears as a source versus competitors’ brands in those same answers, is already a factor in how AI systems build familiarity with topics and entities. Stepping back from that visibility is not cost-free, even temporarily.
Hingewise’s position: the most useful action right now is to pull your AI impressions data before making any opt-out decision. Impressions data, even without click data, reveals which content Google treats as authoritative enough to surface inside AI responses. That signals where a site has established relevance in Google’s AI systems. That information is worth having regardless of what you decide to do next.
Before Deciding Whether to Opt Out: A Quick Checklist
- Pull your AI performance report in Search Console and note which pages are generating impressions in AI features.
- Compare those pages to your top organic traffic pages: are they the same URLs, or different ones?
- Check your direct and referral traffic for the past 90 days to see if any uplift correlates with the period AI features began surfacing your content.
- Check your robots.txt for Google-Extended: the opt-out toggle and Google-Extended are separate controls with different effects (AI feature appearances vs. AI model training).
- If you have subproperties in Search Console, verify whether they are set to inherit the parent’s control or are configured independently.
- Review Google’s updated best-practice guidance on content organisation and unique, non-commodity content, per blog.google: this affects AI visibility regardless of how you set the toggle.
The most important development to track from here is whether Google adds click data to the AI performance report. That single addition would transform the report from a reach metric into a performance metric with genuine business utility. Google’s developers.google.com post noted the team is “continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights and data would be most helpful.” Whether click-through data arrives in a near-term update will determine how actionable this tool becomes.
Sources: Search Engine Land (Aug 2026); blog.google (2026); developers.google.com (Jun 2026); support.google.com (2026).
This article was drafted with AI assistance from the sources cited above and checked against them before publishing. The "What this means for AI-search visibility" section is Hingewise's editorial analysis, built on the frameworks and positions we use in our GEO work. How we work: Editorial policy.