For more than a year, website owners had no way of checking whether Google was showing their content in AI-generated answers. That has changed. After tests on a selected group of websites, Google has made the generative AI report in Search Console available to all users worldwide. Below we explain what you will find in it and how to use this data in a small or medium-sized business.

What the new report shows

The report collects the impressions a website has received in AI-based features such as AI Overviews (summaries above the results) and AI Mode (a conversation with the search engine). In it you can see:

• how many times your pages appeared as a source in an AI answer,
• which specific subpages were cited,
• where these impressions come from, i.e. from which AI feature.

This is the first official data on the subject. Previously, you had to rely on external tools that could only estimate visibility in AI.

Why this matters for a local business

AI answers take up more and more space on the screen, and some users do not scroll down to the classic results at all. Studies from the past year show that the vast majority of queries in AI Mode end without a click on any website. For a business, this means two things:

1. Traffic from Google alone is no longer a complete measure of visibility. A customer may have read about your business in an AI answer and phoned you without visiting the website.
2. Being a cited source is becoming a new goal, alongside rankings in the results.

How to read the data: three scenarios

1. Many impressions in AI, few clicks

This is a typical picture for how-to content. The AI summarises the answer, so the user does not need to click. The solution: put something in the content that cannot be summarised, for example a calculator, an indicative price list, a gallery of completed projects or a quote form.

2. Blog posts are cited, not offer pages

AI is more willing to draw on content that answers a specific question. Add a questions and answers section to your service pages, based on what customers really ask over the phone.

3. Zero impressions in AI

Most often the reason is mundane: the website has indexing problems or the content is too general. Google communicates clearly that for a page to be a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, it must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. There are no additional technical requirements or special markup for AI.

What the report will not tell you

• It does not show visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude. It is data from Google Search only.
• It does not show what exactly the AI wrote about your business. Once a month, it is worth manually asking a few questions about your industry and city and seeing who gets mentioned.
• It will not replace measuring phone calls and forms. Without conversion tracking, you cannot judge whether visibility in AI translates into enquiries.

What to do this week

1. Log in to Search Console and check whether the report is already available for your property.
2. Record the baseline: the number of impressions in AI and the list of cited subpages.
3. Choose your three most important offer pages and add specific answers to customers’ questions to them.
4. Return to the report after four weeks and compare.

If you would like us to analyse this data for you, start with a free SEO audit. We will check your classic visibility and your visibility in AI answers. We write about how we prepare websites for search engines and AI assistants on the AI agent services page.

Sources: Google Search Central announcements, industry summaries from September 2026.