From The SEO Playbook for 2027
Search Console's generative AI report, and the control beside it
Search Console's Search generative AI performance report shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features: impressions by page, country, device and date. It shows no clicks and no queries. It launched on 3 June 2026 and has been available to all sites since 31 August 2026 (Search Central blog, 2026-06-03; Search Engine Roundtable, 2026-09-01) [Official] [News].
Next to it sits a different thing with a similar name: the Search generative AI control, which decides whether your site appears in those features at all. Here is what each does, where AI Mode clicks are counted instead, and how the control differs from Google-Extended.
What the report shows, and what it leaves out
| Shows | Doesn't show |
|---|---|
| Impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features | Clicks |
| Broken down by page, country, device and date | The queries that triggered them |
Clicks from AI Mode are elsewhere. AI Mode clicks, impressions and positions are counted in the standard Performance report, alongside ordinary results (Performance report help, undated) [Official]. So the new report tells you which pages surface in AI features; the Performance report is still where clicks are.
Bing goes further on queries. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, in public preview since 10 February 2026, shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI answers, with the "grounding queries" behind the citations. Intents, topics, citation share and a comparison view were added on 16 June 2026 (Bing, 2026-02-10; Bing, 2026-06-16) [Official]. As of the book's cut-off it is the only first-party report from a major engine that also shows the queries behind AI citations.
Both are free. Paid AI visibility trackers add prompt-by-prompt tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity and other engines; the 14 we price that sell to brands start at $29 a month (Otterly.AI), read from each vendor's pricing page on 8 October 2026. Our AI visibility tools pricing page compares them per tracked prompt.
The Search generative AI control
Rolled out to all sites on 31 August 2026, the control in Search Console lets you exclude your site's links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. The default is to include. Google says the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal elsewhere in Search, and that excluding your site means you receive no traffic or impressions from those features (Search generative AI control, Search Console Help) [Official].
It is not the same as Google-Extended. Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that governs whether your content is used to train and ground Gemini models; Google says it does not affect inclusion in Google Search or AI Overviews (Google's common crawlers, updated 2026-07-14). One switch is about AI features in Search, the other about model training and Gemini.
Why it exists. On 3 June 2026 the UK's Competition and Markets Authority required Google to give publishers effective controls over the use of their content in generative AI features, including AI Overviews, by about March 2027 (CMA, 2026-06-03) [Regulator]. Google had said on 18 March 2026 that it was building opt-outs for these features (Google, 2026-03-18).
The disagreement: is AI visibility its own discipline, needing its own tools? Mike King of iPullRank argues yes, and called Google's AI guidance "naive and self-serving" (iPullRank, 2026-05-18) [Practitioner]. Microsoft describes its own AI Performance report as an early step towards "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling" (Bing, 2026-02-10).
Google treats it as ordinary SEO: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." Its report measures AI features the same way it measures search, by impressions.
Source: Google Search Central, "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search", published 2026-05-15, updated 2026-07-10.
Do this
- Check the Search generative AI control and leave it on "Include" unless you have decided otherwise. If you change it, measure what happens.Done when: you have recorded its value and the date you checked it.
- Record your AI-surface baseline: impressions from the generative AI report, citations from Bing's AI Performance report, and sessions referred by AI assistants in your analytics.Done when: each of the three numbers is recorded for the last full month, with the date you took it.
- Segment AI referrals in analytics: chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com, gemini.google.com and claude.ai. Some AI traffic arrives without a referrer, so this undercounts.Done when: the segment exists and shows last month's sessions.
- Pull all of it into one monthly report, with AI crawler counts from your server logs.Done when: the first month's baseline is in the report.
Where the book goes further
Chapter 9, free on this site, explains what gets pages cited in the first place. The book adds the baseline in Chapter 1 that these numbers belong to (branded and non-branded traffic, the update timeline, indexing by template) and a monthly reporting routine in its 13-week plan.
The SEO Playbook for 2027 covers this in Chapter 1 (how search changed) and Chapter 9 (AI search visibility), with the evidence label, date and link behind every claim and numbered steps that each end in a check. It costs $39.
See what's in the book · Read Chapter 9 free: how to optimize your website for AI search