Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console: announced Wednesday, June 3 2026

Here’s the bit that connects to what a lot of you are already seeing. Website analytics have been trending down in the Google portal for a while now. Clicks softening, sessions dipping, traffic looking flatter than it used to, even on content that’s doing everything right.

For most sites, that’s not your content failing. It’s AI search quietly absorbing the click. When an AI Overview answers the question on the page, the user often never needs to leave Google. The impression still happened. Your page was still seen and cited. The click just didn’t follow. So your analytics show a dip while your actual visibility may be holding or even growing, you just couldn’t see it.

*The same query, two outcomes. The click never lands, so your analytics dip. But the impression was still counted, so your AI visibility holds, and it’s now visible in the report.*

That’s exactly the gap this update starts to close. Capturing this information live, straight from Google rather than guessed at through third-party tools, lets us separate “we’re losing visibility” from “we’re being seen in AI but the click is staying with Google.” Those are two completely different problems with two completely different fixes. Until now, you couldn’t tell them apart. Now you can begin to.

To be clear, AI search isn’t the only reason analytics dip. A core update, seasonality, a tracking or consent setup change in GA4, or a genuine drop in rankings can all pull your numbers down too. The point isn’t that AI explains everything. It’s that, until now, you had no way to rule it in or out. This report gives you that missing piece.

“For years a traffic dip meant one of a handful of things, and we’d work through them. Now there’s a new one on the list, AI answering the question before the user ever clicks, and it’s been invisible in the data. Being able to see AI visibility on its own changes how we diagnose a drop and how we build a client’s strategy around it. We’d rather read the numbers properly than react to them blind.”

Cathy Mellett, Director, Net Branding

For our clients, that means we can read a traffic dip properly instead of reacting to it blind, and build a visibility strategy around where they’re actually showing up.

It didn’t roll out yet for everyone, but it has provided limited early access to a subset of website owners. They are initially focussed heavily on UK Search Console properties (UK, due to the regulatory data-sharing requirements).

So if you don’t see it yet, that’s why. Either you’re not in the small early group, or your site hasn’t picked up enough AI impressions to show data. For the rest of us, it’s a wait.

The mood is split. Relief on one side, frustration on the other.

The relief is “finally.” One write-up called it Google’s version of turning the lights on, after a year of reading tea leaves whenever impressions climbed but clicks didn’t move.

The frustration is the missing click data. Search Engine Land’s take was dry. Google won’t tell us how many people click through from AI responses, and no surprise there. The real problem is business reporting. Without clicks, you can’t compare an impression inside an answer to an actual visit. You’re left pricing the whole thing blind. A few outlets flat out said they don’t expect clicks to ever show up here.

And the stakes are real. One study of 3,119 informational queries across 25.1 million organic impressions found a 61% drop in organic click-through rate and a 68% drop in paid traffic where AI Overviews appeared. Pew tracked 68,879 unique queries and found people clicked results 8% of the time when an AI Overview showed, versus 15% without. Only 1% clicked a link inside the overview itself.

Worth noting: Google isn’t first. Bing shipped its own AI performance report back in February 2026, months ahead of Google. But the two aren’t measuring the same thing, and this is the bit to get right. Per Search Engine Land, Bing’s report tracks citations, how often your content is cited to ground an AI answer across Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries, and select partner integrations. It’s citation frequency, not impressions the way Google counts them. Google’s report counts impressions, how often your link appears in an AI feature. So if you’re comparing the two, you’re comparing citations on Bing’s side against impressions on Google’s. Different metric, different surfaces. Don’t treat them as the same number.

Stop measuring AI success in clicks. Start measuring it in visibility.

Expect big impression counts with no click story attached. If your page is cited in an AI answer, the user often never needs to leave Google. That’s not a failure, it’s the new normal. A comparison page might lose clicks but rack up AI Overview impressions. A product guide might surface constantly in AI Mode without sending much traffic.

The report also doubles as an authority signal. It effectively flags which of your pages Google’s AI treats as authoritative, at the impression level. And the content lesson holds steady. Topical depth beats breadth. Sites with thorough, interlinked coverage of a subject keep showing up.

This is one of those Google updates that matters more than it first looks. It’s a genuinely useful first step, and overdue. But keep it in perspective. It’s regulator-prompted, UK-first, late behind Bing, beta-limited to impressions, and missing the click and query data that would make it truly useful for reporting.

Our editorial take, based on the commentary and updates we’ve been reading online: most people don’t expect that data to arrive.

Take it for what it is. The first real window into AI search visibility. Just don’t expect it to tell you the whole story yet.

We’re sharing this because we, the team at Net Branding Limited, keep at the forefront of what’s changing. It’s how we understand what’s evolving in the AI marketing landscape, and how we bring best practice to our clients’ visibility strategies.

Net Branding Limited. Helping Kiwi and international businesses get found online since 2008.