Google finishes worldwide rollout of AI Overviews reporting in Search Console

Google has finished rolling out two features in Search Console, its free tool that tells a website how it is doing in Google search. One feature is a report on how a site appears in Google’s AI answers. The other is a switch that keeps a site out of those answers. Site owners have asked for both since AI Overviews began taking traffic away from ordinary search results. Google updated its help pages to say that, as of August 31, 2026, both are available to every website.

The report counts how often a site’s pages appear in AI Overviews, in AI Mode and in the AI Overviews shown inside Discover. The figures can be broken down by page, country, device and date, from hour by hour up to month by month. Two things are missing: the number of clicks and the words people searched for. Google has not said when, or whether, it will add either. Sites that appear only rarely in AI answers may not see the report at all.

The rollout took three months. The report first appeared on June 3 for sites in the United Kingdom. The Competition and Markets Authority, the UK competition regulator, had told Google to give publishers a way to opt out of AI features. More countries got access in July, and every site has it this week.

Search Console replaces guesswork about AI Overviews visibility

Until now most search teams could only guess how visible they were in AI answers. They relied on outside trackers that read AI answers automatically. Search Console is the first set of figures from Google itself showing which pages the AI features draw on. That makes it possible to compare AI visibility with ordinary search results in one tool. The missing click figure still limits any attempt to tie this to money earned.

The opt-out may be the bigger change. Turning the switch on removes a site’s content from the three AI features, both as a cited link and as material used to build the answer. Google says the setting is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search and does not affect the training of its models. It also warns that sites which opt out give up any traffic those features send. According to Search Engine Journal, Google is expected to offer page-by-page controls by March 2027. That would let publishers protect chosen pages rather than a whole site.

Publishers will test whether opting out costs them traffic

Publishers are likely to run tests over the coming weeks to see whether opting out changes the traffic they get. Agencies will start adding the new figures to their monthly reports. Whether Google will ever show clicks from AI Mode is still an open question. For now the report measures visibility, not traffic, and teams should say so when they show it to clients or managers.