If you've logged into Google Search Console recently and noticed a new report you don't remember being there, you're not imagining things. Google rolled out a dedicated Search Generative AI performance report on June 3, 2026, and most business owners haven't looked at it yet, mostly because nobody explained what it's for.
What the report actually shows
The new report gives you visibility into how often your pages show up inside Google's AI-generated answers: AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the AI features inside Discover. You can break that down by page, by country, and by device. What it doesn't give you yet is clicks, click-through rate, or the actual search queries that triggered the appearance. Right now it's an impressions-only view, which makes it useful for spotting patterns but not yet for calculating return on any single piece of content.
One more thing worth knowing before you go looking for trends: the data only goes back to May 18, 2026. There's no historical backfill, so you can't compare this year's AI visibility against last year's. You're starting the clock from scratch.
Where to actually find it
Inside Search Console, go to Performance, then Search results, and look for a new Generative AI tab alongside the usual filters. Some accounts will instead see it listed as a separate "Generative AI" item in the left-hand navigation under Performance. Either way, it's the same report, Google is just still testing slightly different placements for different accounts.
If you open Search Console and don't see it at all, don't assume the worst. Google is rolling this out gradually rather than to every property at once, so a missing report most likely just means your site isn't in that wave yet, not that anything is wrong or that you've been quietly opted out. It also appears to require a minimum number of impressions inside AI features before Google will bother populating a report at all, though Google hasn't published an exact threshold. If you want to improve your odds once it does roll out to you, the same basics apply: keep your key pages crawlable and indexed, make sure Search generative AI features are left enabled in Settings rather than switched off, and use the structured data covered above so there's more for Google's AI systems to actually pick up in the first place.
The opt-out button, and why you probably shouldn't touch it
Alongside the new report, Google added a toggle that lets you remove your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews within Discover, while leaving your normal search rankings and Discover feed untouched. Google is explicit that opting out carries no ranking penalty.
That sounds appealing if you've watched your traffic dip and want to blame the AI summary sitting above your listing. But walking away from that visibility doesn't bring your traffic back, it just means Google pulls the answer from whichever competitor didn't opt out. You lose a channel and gain nothing. The near-universal advice from people who track this closely is that small businesses and independent sites have almost no reason to use this toggle. Large publishers with licensing leverage and alternative revenue streams are a different conversation. A dental clinic in Cebu or a resort in Bantayan is not.
Why Google built this report in the first place
This isn't a minor dashboard tweak. AI Overviews now appear on 48% of all Google searches, up from 31% in early 2025, and reach more than 2.5 billion people a month across 200-plus countries. Since Google's I/O event this year, AI Overviews and AI Mode have effectively merged into one experience, meaning what used to be a summary box is increasingly the front door to a longer AI conversation instead of a list of blue links.
The traffic effect is measurable and it isn't small. Independent research, including a study tracking 5.47 million queries and a separate randomized experiment, both found that organic click-through rate drops somewhere between 34% and 61% on searches where an AI Overview appears, compared to searches where it doesn't. The one bright spot in the data: when your page is the one the AI Overview actually cites, you recover a meaningful share of those clicks. Being invisible to AI Overviews is bad. Being present but not cited is almost as bad. Being cited is where the traffic still shows up.
What to actually do about it
The practical response isn't blocking AI or panicking about lost clicks, it's giving Google's AI systems clear, well-structured reasons to cite you specifically. Structured data plays a bigger role in this than most business owners realize. Schema markup, the behind-the-scenes code that tells Google exactly what a page is, matters most in a handful of types: Organization, Article, FAQPage, Product, and LocalBusiness. The type doesn't do the ranking on its own, but it disambiguates who you are and what you offer, which is exactly the kind of clarity an AI system needs before it's willing to quote you by name.
For businesses here in the Philippines, there's a direct local angle worth knowing: AI Overviews still show up far less often on local-intent searches than on general ones, but a properly filled-out Google Business Profile feeds directly into what Google's Gemini-powered systems recommend. If you haven't touched your profile description, categories, or Q&A section in a while, that's a higher-leverage fix right now than almost anything else on this list.
None of this requires an overhaul. It requires making sure your website and business listings say, in plain and specific language, who you are, what you do, and where, so that when an AI system is deciding who to cite, there's no ambiguity about the answer.
This connects directly to two things we've covered recently: the social media and Google Business Profile algorithm changes rolling out this year, and why a Facebook page alone was never enough even before AI search existed. If you want a second pair of eyes on whether your site is set up to get cited rather than skipped, get in touch and we'll take a look.