AI & automation

Search Console shows how often you appear in AI Mode and AI Overviews

Since 31 August 2026 Google says every site has a report on impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode and a control to opt out. A preprint on clicks measures what happens when AI Mode is imposed on users, not to a site that opts out.

7 October 2026· 7 min·by NaCode Studios

In short

Google says that since 31 August 2026 every site has two tools in Search Console: a report counting how often its links appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a control to opt out of those features. For a business site the choice is between "Include", the default, and "Exclude", and it is best made after reading the report's data.

Updated 7 October 2026. This text rests on Google's official guides, the CMA's documents and the full text of the study, read on that date.

What changed

Google presented the report and the control on 3 June 2026, starting with a group of sites in the United Kingdom. On the same day the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered Google to offer anyone who publishes content on the web effective controls to exclude it from model training and from the answers of its AI features, without penalising it in the rest of Search. The requirement covers users in the United Kingdom: it applies from 3 December 2026, and the page-level control follows three months later, in March 2027.

What the report shows

Search Console's guide calls it the "Generative AI performance report (Search)". It counts impressions, meaning how many times a link to your site was shown in AI Overviews, the summary answers on the results page, and in AI Mode, Google's conversational search. It splits them by page, country, date and device, and a filter separates text searches from multimodal ones, such as Google Lens. Discover has a separate report.

Google's guides describe impressions only, not clicks, and the report may not appear if the site has few of them or if you have excluded it; Google gives no threshold.
The data can be exported from the report. The official Search Console API reference, last updated on 11 August 2026, has no search type for generative AI.
Traffic from these features is included in Search Console's overall traffic, under the Web search type.

The Search Console control

It is in Settings, under "Search generative AI", and is set per property. It covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover.

Option	What happens
Include (default)	Links and content can appear in the AI features
Exclude	No links, no impressions, no traffic from these features
Inherit control from parent	Default for child properties, which can change it

With "Exclude" your site's content can no longer serve as input for an AI answer. Google states that the choice is not a ranking signal for the rest of Search, does not stop model training (for that there is Google-Extended, in the robots.txt file) and does not remove the site from Search (for that there is noindex). Content from other sites stays available in these features and may look similar to yours. The effect generally takes a few days.

What the study says about clicks

On 18 August 2026 a preprint by Stephanie T. Wang and colleagues (University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University) appeared on arXiv: a preregistered experiment on Google Search with US users, recruited in March 2026. After three days of observation, participants were randomly assigned, for seven days, to one of three versions of Google: the normal one, one without AI Overviews or AI Mode, or one with every search forced into AI Mode. The analysis covers the 1,100 who ran at least one search, out of 1,444 who enrolled. Compared with normal search:

with every search forced into AI Mode, the click-through rate to external sites (external clicks divided by searches) fell by 18.8 percentage points;
with AI Overviews and AI Mode removed the same rate rose by 8.8 points, in an estimate that allows for the method having hidden AI Overviews in only 51.1% of cases; the raw difference between the two groups, 2.7 points, is not statistically significant;
in AI Mode the share of users who clicked at least once fell by 21.2 points towards Reddit, 12.5 towards news sites and 9.9 towards Wikipedia.

These figures do not describe your sector. In the test AI Mode was imposed on every search, whereas in the first days participants used it for 0.6% of their searches. The sample is younger and more highly educated than the US population and the test lasted seven days. The study changed what users saw: it did not measure what happens to the clicks of a site that chooses "Exclude". It remains a preprint: the arXiv page shows no publication in a journal.

How to read the data and what to decide

Open Search Console and choose the property. Google's guide gives no menu path: it lists the report among the performance reports and offers a direct link. Look at which pages have the most impressions and whether the multimodal filter changes the picture, then compare them with the clicks in the Search performance report and the enquiries you receive over the same period, such as forms and phone calls.

The choice is made per property. For a section of the site the guide provides child properties, including URL-prefix ones, which can have a setting of their own. Model training is a separate choice, made with Google-Extended in the robots.txt file.

In our view, for most small-business sites it is better to keep "Include" and to reconsider only for a specific reason, for example paid content you do not want summarised. That is our judgement, not Google's guidance or a result of the study: by leaving, your site stops appearing in the AI answers, but the answers stay on the page and cite other sites.

Where we start

The report touches the work we do on websites and e-commerce, where technical SEO, analytics and tracking of key events are part of the service, together with content structure and page loading. Google says that to appear in these features no other requirements or special optimisations are needed: the page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.

If you ask us for a review, we look at which pages have the most impressions and whether they are the ones that bring enquiries, check that they are indexed and can be shown with a snippet, and compare impressions, clicks and contacts over time, so that the choice between "Include" and "Exclude" rests on your own site's numbers. The decision stays yours. We do not promise appearances in AI answers: Google writes that indexing and serving are not guaranteed.

What we do not know yet

When clicks will arrive in the report. Google speaks of additional metrics over time, with no dates; the CMA asks for metrics with impressions, clicks and click-through rate, but for the United Kingdom.
What happens to the clicks of a site that chooses "Exclude". Neither Google's guides nor the study measure it.
How far the study's results hold in Italy. The participants were American and we have no Italian data.

If you want us to look at your site's report together with its technical configuration and loading times, get in touch: the service is described on the Websites and e-commerce page.

Sources

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