AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console: what the data shows

Yes, Search Console includes AI Overviews and AI Mode, but mostly inside your ordinary numbers. Clicks, impressions and positions from both features are counted in the Performance report under the Web search type, mixed in with every other result, and no filter separates them. Since 31 August 2026, Google has also offered every website a Generative AI performance report, which shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode; it reports impressions, with no clicks, no position and no queries.

Are AI Overviews counted in Search Console?

Yes. Google’s documentation on AI features and your website says that sites appearing in them “are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console” and are reported “in the Performance report, within the ‘Web’ search type”. Search Console’s help on how data is counted sets out three rules for AI Overviews:

• Click: following a link in an AI Overview to an external page counts as a click.
• Impression: the standard impression rules apply.
• Position: an AI Overview occupies a single position in the results, and every link inside it is given that position.

The last rule matters most when you read your reports. If an AI Overview sits at the top of the page and cites your article as its fourth link, the impression is recorded at the AI Overview’s position, not at a position of its own.

How is AI Mode counted?

AI Mode has counted towards Search Console totals since June 2025, according to Google’s log of documentation updates. Its rules are close to those for ordinary results:

• Click: following an external link in AI Mode counts as a click.
• Impression: the standard impression rules apply.
• Position: worked out the same way as on a Google Search results page.
• Follow-up questions: a follow-up is treated as a new query, and the impressions, positions and clicks in the new response all count against that new query.

Search Console does not include data from Search Labs experiments, so a feature still in Labs does not appear in your numbers at all.

What the Generative AI performance report shows

Google announced the report on 3 June 2026, starting with a subset of website owners in the UK, and says it had reached all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026. In that announcement post, Google put AI Overviews at more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode at more than one billion monthly users.

The report counts impressions: how many times links to your site were shown to someone in a generative AI feature on Google Search, currently AI Overviews and AI Mode. You can break those impressions down by page, country, device and date, and filter by search type, either Web: text-based or Web: multimodal, the second covering searches made with images, such as Google Lens and Circle to Search. Dates are in Pacific Time, the newest data can be preliminary, and the usual Performance report limits, such as the 1,000-row table, apply. If your site has had too few impressions in these features, the report may not appear. Discover has a separate generative AI report of its own. Google’s help page for the Search report has the details.

The data is a subset of the Web search type in the main Performance report. It is not extra traffic on top of it.

What you can and cannot separate out

Question	Can Search Console answer it?
Total clicks from Google Search, AI features included	Yes: Performance → Search results, Web
Clicks that came from AI Overviews	No
Clicks that came from AI Mode	No
Which pages appeared in AI features, and how often	Yes, as impressions in the Generative AI report
Countries and devices for those impressions	Yes, in the Generative AI report
Which queries showed your site in an AI feature	No: the report has no query dimension
Where your link sat inside an AI Overview	No: every link shares the overview’s position

On the clicks it does not itemise, Google’s documentation says that “when people click from search results pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality”, meaning visitors are more likely to spend more time on the site. That is Google’s claim about searchers in aggregate. Search Console cannot confirm or refute it for your site; your analytics tool can at least show how organic visitors behave once they arrive.

What this means when clicks drop

1. Read the shape of the drop first. Clicks down with impressions steady is a click-through problem. An AI Overview answering the question above your result is one possible cause, alongside a rewritten title, a rich result or another feature taking the space. Search Console cannot tell you which, but it can narrow the field.
2. Check the same page in the Generative AI report. If a page that lost clicks shows rising AI feature impressions over the same dates, AI features are a plausible part of the story. If its AI impressions are flat or absent, look elsewhere.
3. Do not treat a better average position as good news on its own. A citation in an AI Overview at the top of the page records the overview’s position, so average position can improve while clicks fall. Judge position against clicks and CTR, query by query.
4. Expect longer, conversational queries. AI Mode follow-ups are counted as new queries, which is one reason question-like queries you never targeted can turn up in your Queries table.
5. Be careful with impression comparisons across April 2026. Google’s Data anomalies page records a logging error that prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions between 13 May 2025 and 27 April 2026. Impressions, CTR and average position were affected; clicks were not. When a comparison includes days on both sides of 27 April 2026, trust the clicks and treat the impressions with suspicion.
6. Check the property’s settings. If someone set the property’s Search generative AI control to Exclude, it stops receiving traffic and impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, and that shows up as a drop of its own.

Search Console metrics explained covers how clicks, impressions, CTR and position move each other, and clicks dropped, now what walks through a full investigation.

Should you exclude your site from AI features?

That is a business decision, and Search Console now makes it an explicit one. The control sits under Settings → Search generative AI and has three options: Include, which is the default; Exclude; and Inherit from parent, for a property that sits inside another. Google rolled it out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026. Its help pages say the setting is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of Search, that exclusion generally takes effect within a few days, and that it does not affect AI training, for which Google points to Google-Extended instead.

The cost is stated just as plainly: an excluded site receives no traffic or impressions from these features. Look at the Generative AI report before you decide, so you know what you would be giving up.

Where QueryWatch fits

QueryWatch reads the same Web search data through Google’s API, so clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are inside the totals it shows, exactly as they are on the web, and it cannot separate them either. It does not show the Generative AI performance report. What it does cover is the start of the investigation above: on Pro, an alert when a property’s clicks move well outside their recent average, and on every tier, a change investigation showing the pages and queries the move came from. If those turn out to be question-style queries on informational pages, you know which report to open next on the web. The product page has the rest.