Google finishes global rollout of AI Overviews reporting and opt-out in Search Console

Google has completed the worldwide rollout of two Search Console features that site owners have been asking for since AI Overviews began eating into organic traffic: a performance report for generative AI surfaces and a property-level switch to keep content out of them. The company updated its documentation to state that, as of August 31, 2026, both the insights and the control are available to all websites.

The new report tracks how often a site’s URLs appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI Overviews shown in Discover. Data can be sliced by page, country, device and date, with granularity ranging from hourly to monthly. Two things are absent: click counts and query data. Google has not said when, or whether, either will be added, and properties with too few AI impressions may not see the report at all.

The rollout has been staged over three months. The report first appeared on June 3 for sites in the United Kingdom, where the Competition and Markets Authority had required Google to give publishers a way to opt out of AI features. Access expanded to more markets in July before reaching every property this week.

Why it matters

Until now, most SEO teams could only guess at their share of AI visibility, relying on third-party trackers that scrape AI answers. Search Console is the first first-party dataset showing which pages Google’s generative features draw on, which makes it possible to compare AI exposure against classic organic performance in the same tool, even if the missing click metric limits any revenue attribution.

The opt-out is arguably the bigger change. Flipping the toggle removes a site’s content from the three AI surfaces, both as cited links and as grounding material for the generated answer. Google stresses that the setting is not treated as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search and does not affect model training, but it also warns that sites which opt out will forgo any traffic those features send. According to Search Engine Journal, Google is expected to deliver page-level controls by March 2027, which would allow publishers to protect selected content rather than an entire domain.

What’s next

Expect a wave of experiments over the coming weeks as publishers test whether opting out changes their referral numbers, and as agencies fold the new impression data into monthly reporting. The larger question, whether Google will eventually expose clicks from AI Mode, remains open. For now the report is a visibility metric rather than a traffic one, and teams should label it as such when presenting it to clients or management.