Google has rolled out the generative AI performance report and a matching content opt-out toggle to every Search Console account worldwide as of August 31, according to updated Google documentation. The report breaks out impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates for content appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative results in Discover. It does not include click data.
That gap matters more this week than it would have a month ago. This publication reported on August 31 that some AI Overviews are now opening at full height by default, with no user click required to expand them, and that publishers had no first-party way to identify which queries triggered that behavior because Search Console carried no separate AI figures at all. The global rollout of the AI performance report answers half of that problem. Publishers can now see impression volume tied to AI surfaces. They still cannot see whether a fully expanded, click-free AI Overview converted into a visit or simply consumed the impression.
Google Search Central documentation frames the report as a visibility tool, and the framing is accurate as far as it goes. A site that has never appeared in the report can now confirm whether it shows up in AI Mode or AI Overviews and in which countries. What the report cannot answer is the question publishers have been asking since AI Overviews launched: whether growing AI impressions are adding incremental reach or displacing clicks that used to land on the page. Google controls both sides of that comparison and has chosen to expose only one.
The opt-out toggle is the more consequential of the two features for anyone weighing a defensive move. Google’s documentation states plainly that sites which opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from generative AI features, and that the setting will not be used as a ranking signal in classic web search. That second point removes the main reason publishers avoided testing content controls before: the fear that blocking AI grounding would quietly cost blue-link rankings too. According to Google’s own documentation, the two systems are now confirmed to be decoupled.
Site owners had been requesting this level of control since Google introduced AI Overviews, and a narrower version of the reporting tool had already been in limited testing before this global release. The rollout closes that testing period rather than opening a new capability. What changes today is availability, not the underlying limitation: impressions without clicks still leave publishers unable to calculate a true AI-driven click-through rate, only a share-of-surface number.
Search teams should treat the new report as an inventory tool, not a performance dashboard, until Google adds click or estimated-traffic data. The immediate action is to pull impression counts by page and country now that every account has access, flag any page appearing heavily in AI Mode with unusually low organic sessions in the same period, and use that gap as the working proxy for click loss until better data exists. Sites considering the opt-out should test it on a low-traffic content set first, since reversing the setting restores AI-surface eligibility but not any impressions lost during the trial window.
Search Engine Land, reporting by Barry Schwartz, published August 31, 2026.
