AI Overviews in Search Console: The Generative AI Report and Opt-Out Control Explained

Google Search Console now has two AI tools every site owner should know: the Generative AI performance report, which shows how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the Search generative AI control, which lets you opt your whole site out of those features. Both reached all sites worldwide on 31 August 2026.

What changed in Search Console?

Until this year, Search Console mixed AI Overview appearances into the normal Performance report without telling you which impressions came from AI. And keeping content out of AI Overviews meant blunt tools: noindex, which removes the page from Google, or nosnippet, which also strips your normal search snippets. Both of those limitations are now gone.

How do you read the Generative AI performance report?

Open Search Console, choose Performance and then the Generative AI report for Search (Discover has its own). Google defines an impression as a link to your site being shown to a user in a generative AI feature. The report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together; you can’t separate the two, and experiments in Search Labs aren’t included.

• Pages — which URLs appeared, reported under their canonical URL. This is the most useful tab: it tells you which pages Google’s AI actually uses as sources.
• Countries and Devices — where and on what those impressions happened.
• Dates — the trend over time. The newest data is preliminary and shown as a dotted line.
• Search type — “Web: text-based” or the new “Web: multimodal”.

Two details trip people up. First, the chart counts per property: if two of your pages appear in the same AI Overview, the chart counts one impression, while the Pages table counts both — so totals can differ. Second, the usual Search Console limits apply, including a maximum of 1,000 rows in the table. Use Export for anything larger.

A practical workflow: export the Pages tab, then compare it with the same period in the normal Performance report. Pages with many AI impressions but few clicks are being used as sources without sending visitors; pages with no AI impressions at all may simply not be indexed — check them with how to check if a page is indexed. For raising your citations, see how to get cited in AI search.

How does the Search generative AI opt-out control work?

Go to Settings → Search generative AI. You get two choices (three for child properties):

According to Google, the choice applies to the whole property and to child properties, which inherit it unless their owner overrides it. So a domain property decision also applies to blog.example.com and https://example.com/shop/ unless those are configured separately.

Three things the control does not do, all stated by Google:

• It is not a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search. Your normal results are unaffected.
• It doesn’t affect AI training. For that you still need Google-Extended in robots.txt — see AI crawlers and robots.txt.
• Your content may still help Google Search as a whole, for example in understanding the language of queries and pages.

Search generative AI control vs Google-Extended vs noindex

If you only want to protect specific snippets rather than whole pages, the nosnippet rule and data-nosnippet attribute still exist, but they also limit your normal search snippets.

Should you opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode?

For most sites, no. Opting out removes your links from the answers that increasingly sit above the classic results, while your competitors’ content stays in. Google also notes that content from other sites “may appear similar to yours” once you’re excluded — so you may lose the visibility without removing the information.

The trade-off is real, though. A preprint field study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern, reported by Search Engine Journal, found that people forced to use AI Mode clicked through to other websites 18.8 percentage points less often than people using regular Search. It’s a forced-adoption experiment, not normal behaviour, but it shows why some publishers want out.

Opting out can make sense if your content is the product — paywalled research, data, original reporting — and AI answers substitute for a visit. Before switching, look at your Generative AI report: if your AI impressions are high and your clicks from the same pages are steady, staying in is likely helping, not hurting.

What is the new multimodal filter?

Since 24 September 2026, both the Performance report and the Generative AI report have a search type option for web searches that started with an image. Google says it covers Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search and Chrome’s right-click “Search this image”. If you sell products or publish visual content, this is the first time you can see that traffic separately. Data only appears if your site actually gets such searches.

If people find your pages through images, make sure those images carry your name and license too: see image metadata for Google.

What we see on this site

Both features are available for indexurepoint.com, which launched this month. As of 10 October 2026, the Generative AI report shows 4 impressions in total for 22 September to 6 October, one each for four pages: the home page, our guides hub, the Indexing API article and the orphan pages article. Four impressions is too small a sample to conclude anything, but it shows the report is live for a site this new. The control is set to the default, include, and we’re leaving it there: an independent guide wants to be cited. We’ll update these numbers as the report fills.

For the Microsoft side of the same question, Bing Webmaster Tools has its own AI Performance report showing citations in Copilot — see Bing Webmaster Tools.

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