Google Search Console AI Reports Are Now Global: How to Track AI Overviews & AI Mode (2026)

For three months, the most useful new report in Google Search Console belonged almost exclusively to the United Kingdom.

That’s not a metaphor — it’s literally how the rollout happened. As of August 31, 2026, that’s over. Google has confirmed its Generative AI performance report is now live for websites worldwide, closing out one of the stranger phased launches Search Console has run in years. Here’s the full timeline, what the report actually shows, and how to start using it today.

Why It Started in the UK, Not Everywhere

Google introduced the Generative AI performance report on June 3, 2026 — but not for you, unless you happened to manage a UK-based property. That geographic limit wasn’t arbitrary. It traced back to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which has been pushing Google toward giving publishers more visibility and control over how their content gets used in AI features. The same release that added the reporting dashboard also shipped a companion toggle letting site owners opt content out of AI features entirely — both features launched together, both UK-only at first, both clearly regulatory in origin.

Google was candid that the limited release was a testing phase, and that historical data would only begin accumulating from May 18, 2026 onward — so even UK site owners who got early access weren’t looking at a complete history when the report first appeared.

The Quiet Middle Stretch: August 11

Google never announced a formal expansion between June and late August — the next visible milestone came from outside observation. On August 11, 2026, Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported that the report appeared to be live across every Search Console property he had access to — roughly 25 of them. He flagged it as a probable full rollout, but Google’s own John Mueller pushed back the same day, confirming on Reddit that it wasn’t yet live for every domain, and reiterating a detail worth remembering: like Search Console’s News and Discover reports, this one only displays when a property has collected enough underlying data. An empty-looking report isn’t necessarily a report you’ve been excluded from — it may just mean your AI-surface impressions haven’t cleared Google’s display threshold yet.

The Real Global Rollout: August 31

The confirmed, official expansion landed three weeks later. Google updated its own Search Central documentation with a dated note: as of August 31, 2026, the insights rolled out to all websites worldwide. Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable both confirmed the change, and the same global timing applied to the AI-features opt-out control that launched alongside the report back in June.

One caveat carried over from the UK beta and still applies globally: Google’s own help documentation continues to note that not every property will see the report populated, for the same reason Mueller gave in August — insufficient data. Global availability means the option exists everywhere now, not that every site will have something to look at immediately.

What the Report Actually Shows

Strip away the rollout drama and the report itself is fairly narrow — deliberately so, according to Google, with more depth promised over time. It isolates one metric, sliced five ways:

• Impressions — how often your site’s URLs appeared inside generative AI features across Search (AI Overviews, AI Mode) and Discover
• Pages — which specific URLs generated those impressions, a breakdown not available anywhere else in Search Console
• Countries — where that AI-surface visibility is coming from geographically
• Devices — what hardware people were using when your content appeared (Search results only; not currently broken out for Discover)
• Dates — trend view with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity available from day one

What’s conspicuously absent: clicks, click-through rate, average position, and query-level data. This is an impressions-only report. You can see that your pages showed up inside an AI answer; you cannot yet see what someone typed to trigger that answer, or whether they clicked through afterward. Google has said additional metrics are planned, but as of this writing, impressions are the entire report.

Two Measurement Quirks Worth Knowing Before You Trust the Numbers

Aggregation. If the same URL shows up both inside an AI Overview and as a standard blue link on the same results page, that counts as one impression, not two. The same logic applies when multiple results from your property appear inside a single AI feature — they collapse into one impression at the property level rather than stacking.

The display threshold. Content buried in a collapsed or clustered panel inside an AI answer doesn’t register an impression until a user actually expands it into view. Your raw impression count reflects what was actually displayed to someone, not everything you were technically eligible to appear in. That distinction matters if you’re trying to reconcile this report against a third-party AI visibility tool that measures inclusion differently.

Where to Find It

The report sits as an expandable tab nested under the main Performance report in Search Console — not a separate top-level section, so it’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. If it’s not showing for your property, the two most common reasons are the ones already covered above: you’re waiting on the property-level data threshold, or — if you’re checking this in the first half of 2026 rather than now — you simply hadn’t been reached by the rollout yet.

Reading This Report Correctly

The most common mistake with this data is using it to answer a question it was never built to answer. Impressions tell you whether AI systems are showing your content — they say nothing about whether that translates into a visit. A page with strong AI impressions and weak referral traffic in your analytics isn’t necessarily underperforming; it may simply mean the AI-generated answer satisfied the reader without a click, which is an increasingly normal outcome as AI Overviews and AI Mode absorb more of the informational search that used to route through blue links.

If you want the traffic side of that picture, this report needs to be paired with something outside Search Console entirely — a custom AI-referral channel in GA4, for instance — since Search Console itself, at least for now, only tells you the “were you shown” half of the story.

A Practical Checklist

1. Confirm you have global access. If you checked before August 31 and saw nothing, check again — the UK-only limitation is gone.
2. Give it time before drawing conclusions. Historical data only goes back to May 18, 2026 at the earliest, and Google’s own display threshold means a quiet report may just be a data problem, not a visibility problem.
3. Cross-reference the Pages breakdown against your actual content priorities. This is the one dimension that isn’t available anywhere else in Search Console — use it.
4. Don’t over-read the absence of click data. It’s not hidden from you; Google hasn’t shipped it yet. Treat this report as a citation/visibility signal, not a traffic report.
5. Pair it with your analytics. Impressions here plus AI-referred sessions in GA4 gives you the fuller funnel — visibility on one side, actual visits on the other.
6. Check the opt-out control too, even if you don’t plan to use it. It rolled out on the same global timeline and lives in the same part of Search Console, so it’s worth knowing it’s there.

FAQ

Is this report only for UK sites now?

No. As of August 31, 2026, it’s available to websites worldwide, closing out a phased rollout that started as a UK-only beta in June.

Why don’t I see any data in my property?

Most likely one of two reasons: your site hasn’t crossed Google’s minimum-impressions threshold for the report to display anything, or your historical data simply hasn’t accumulated yet since the earliest data point is May 18, 2026.

Does this report include AI Mode specifically, or just AI Overviews?

Both. Google’s own description covers generative AI features within Search, which explicitly includes AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus the generative features inside Discover.

Will click and query data ever be added?

Google has indicated more metrics are coming but hasn’t committed to a timeline. As it stands, this is an impressions-only report.

How is this different from the AI-features opt-out toggle?

They’re related but separate. The performance report shows you visibility data; the opt-out control lets you block your content from AI features altogether. Both launched together in June and both went global on the same August 31 date.

This guide reflects Google’s Search Central documentation and independent reporting current as of September 2026. This feature moved through three distinct phases in under three months — check Google’s own Search Central blog directly before making reporting decisions based on any single detail here.