Tracking AI Overviews: what you can measure, and what you can’t

AI search 15 September 2026·9 min read

For two years, the honest answer to “how do I track AI Overviews?” was that you couldn’t, not in Google’s own tools. By 31 August 2026 that had changed: Search Console’s generative AI performance report had reached every site. It reports impressions — not clicks, and not queries. Tracking AI Overviews is now possible, but only partly, and the missing part is where most of the questions are.

What Search Console shows you now

There are two places to look, and they answer different questions.

The Performance report: AI traffic was always in there

Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode have been counted in the ordinary Performance report all along, under the Web search type, mixed in with everything else. Google’s counting rules for them are specific:

  • AI Overviews. A click on a link counts as a click, and “an AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position.”
  • AI Mode. A click on an external link counts as a click, and position follows the same method as an ordinary results page. A follow-up question counts as a brand-new query.
  • Search Labs experiments are not included at all.

The first rule is easy to miss and explains a lot. A page cited in an AI Overview at the top of the results is recorded at that top position, which is one reason impressions and average position can improve while clicks fall.

The generative AI performance report: a separate view, impressions only

Google announced the report on 3 June 2026, tested it with a subset of sites, and had rolled it out to every site worldwide by 31 August. It isolates impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and gives you:

  • Impressions: how often links to your site appeared in those features.
  • Pages: which URLs appeared, assigned to the canonical URL as elsewhere in Search Console.
  • Countries and devices.
  • Dates, down to hourly granularity.

It leaves out four things you will want:

  • Clicks. You can see that a page was shown in an AI answer, not whether anyone visited because of it.
  • Queries. There is no query dimension, so you cannot see which questions triggered the appearance.
  • AI Overviews versus AI Mode. The two are counted together.
  • Mentions without a link. An impression is a link to your site being shown. An answer that names your brand but links to someone else does not count for you.

The usual Performance report limits apply, including the 1,000-row table cap, and a site with too few AI impressions may not see the report at all.

A matrix comparing four data sources — the Search Console Performance report, the generative AI performance report, a rank tracker and analytics — across eight questions. Only the generative AI report shows AI impressions as such; no source shows clicks from AI features labelled as such; queries and competitor citations come from rank trackers; the value of a visit comes only from analytics.
No single source answers all of it. The generative AI report is the only one that isolates AI impressions, and nothing isolates AI clicks. Search Console capabilities as of September 2026.

What it means for traffic

Because the report has no clicks, the question everyone asks — how much traffic are AI Overviews costing me? — still has to be answered indirectly. The independent evidence points one way:

  • Pew Research Center analysed the March 2025 browsing of 900 US adults. On searches that showed an AI summary, people clicked a traditional result 8% of the time, against 15% on searches without one. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself.
  • Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords between December 2023 and December 2025 and found that an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower click-through rate for the page in position one — up from the 34.5% it measured a year earlier.

Google’s documentation takes a different angle: when people click from results pages with AI Overviews, it says, “these clicks are higher quality”, meaning visitors tend to spend more time on the site. Both can be true at once — fewer clicks, better ones — which is why the measurement worth doing is not clicks alone but what the remaining visits are worth.

What rank trackers add, and where they mislead

Third-party tools fill the query gap. Give them a keyword list and they record whether an AI Overview appears, whether your URL is cited and who else is — competitive questions Search Console cannot answer. Three cautions before you trust the output.

They sample a moving target. Ahrefs followed more than 43,000 keywords for a month and found an AI Overview’s content changed between consecutive observations 70% of the time, lasting about 2.15 days on average. Only 54.5% of cited URLs carried over from one response to the next. A weekly check is a snapshot of something that changes every two days.

Rankings are no longer a proxy for citations. In Ahrefs’ March 2026 analysis of 863,000 keywords, 38% of AI Overview citations came from pages in the top ten, down from about 76% in its July 2025 study. Tracking positions tells you less about citations every year.

They see from their location, not your customers’. A check from one data centre says little about the answer a buyer in another country gets. And Google’s 2026 guidance is blunt about tools that claim more: “No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems.”

Analytics: keep an eye on direct traffic

A click from an AI Overview or AI Mode normally arrives as Google organic traffic. Twice it has not. In May 2025, links in AI Mode carried rel="noreferrer", so visits showed up as direct traffic until Google fixed what its John Mueller called a bug, within days. In March 2026, links in AI Mode’s sidebar were reported to pass no referrer either. If direct traffic to informational landing pages jumps while organic dips, rule that out before drawing conclusions.

The routine I use

This is the monthly setup I run on multi-market sites. Once it is built, it takes about an hour.

  1. Export AI impressions by page and country

    From the generative AI report, per market. On an international site the country split matters more than the total: AI Mode reached different countries months apart, and the same page can be cited heavily in one market and never in another.

  2. Join them to clicks from the Performance report

    Same pages, same countries, same month. Pages with rising AI impressions and falling organic clicks are where an AI answer is absorbing the visit; pages with AI impressions and steady clicks are where it is sending people on.

  3. Group pages by template and intent

    Individual URLs are noisy. Guides, product pages and category pages behave differently, and the pattern only shows in groups.

  4. Track a fixed set of questions per market

    Twenty to fifty buyer questions, written natively for each market and checked on a schedule, recording presence, citation and competitors. This is the query layer Search Console does not give you. To see how other assistants answer the same question, the free AI visibility checker puts it to Claude, OpenAI and Perplexity.

  5. Measure what the visits are worth

    Engagement and conversions on the pages AI features cite, in analytics. If Google is right that these clicks are better, this is where it shows — not in click counts.

Why the questions have to be per market, and not translated from English, is covered in answer engine optimisation for multi-market brands.

Before you consider opting out

Since 31 August 2026 every site also has a Search generative AI control in its Search Console settings. Excluding a site removes its links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover. Google says the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search, and that it does not affect model training — that remains the job of Google-Extended. It takes a few days to apply, and it follows property inheritance, so a URL-prefix property for one market’s folder can be set differently from the rest of the domain.

Look before you switch

Opting out removes the impressions along with the answers. For most sites the decision depends on numbers only the generative AI report can show, so read a few months of it first.

Sources

Questions

Partly. Since 31 August 2026 every site can use the generative AI performance report: impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date. It shows no clicks and no queries, and it does not separate the two features. Clicks from both are counted, unlabelled, in the regular Performance report.
Not separately. A click in an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts as an ordinary click in the Performance report under Web, but nothing marks where it came from — and the generative AI report shows impressions only.
Good for competitive checks, not precise. In Ahrefs’ data an AI Overview’s content changed between consecutive observations 70% of the time, and only about half the cited URLs carried over. Read tracker results as trends across many keywords, not as the answer one customer sees.
Independent studies say yes: Pew Research found clicks on 8% of searches with an AI summary against 15% without, and Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the top result. Google says the clicks that remain are higher quality.