Google rolled the generative AI performance report out to every site in Search Console on August 31. We finally sat down and read ours this week. If you run a small site, here's what the first real numbers look like — page by page.
Where to find it
Search Console → Performance → look for the "generative AI features" link under the main chart (there's a separate report for Search and one for Discover). Two things to know before you open it:
- It reports impressions only — your link was shown inside an AI answer. No clicks, no CTR.
- The data lags. Our Search Console data froze for nine days this fall before a batch update landed. Don't check it daily and panic.
The report covers impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says the list will grow as search changes.
Our numbers (Aug 8 – Oct 30)
16 impressions. Total. In twelve weeks.
The distribution is more interesting than the total:
- One page — a comparison article, "5 best AI marketing automation platforms compared" — got 6 impressions. More than a third of everything, on one URL.
- About ten other pages got exactly 1 each: a handful of blog posts, plus the homepage.
- The homepage showed up twice, once as
http://and once ashttps://. That's a canonicalization problem, not a win.
Three things we took from it
1. A tiny site does show up — barely. 16 impressions is a floor, not a milestone. Third-party trackers keep reporting AI referral traffic climbing through 2026, so the honest framing is: the baseline is near zero today, and the only useful move is to start measuring before it grows.
2. Comparison content wins. Our single strongest page is a "5 best X compared" post — 6× the impressions of anything else. That matches how AI answers are built: when someone asks "which tool should I use," the answer needs concrete candidates and tradeoffs to quote. "Best of", "vs", and "alternatives" structures give it exactly that. We're writing more of them.
3. Check your homepage variants. Showing up under both http:// and https:// means we're splitting (and probably wasting) whatever visibility we have. Canonical tags are on the fix list this week.
Caveats worth repeating
Impressions are not clicks and not traffic. The report tells you an AI feature showed your link — it says nothing about whether anyone read it, acted on it, or arrived. We treat it as an exposure meter, nothing more.
What we're doing next
- Fixing the
http/httpsduplication - Requesting indexing for the pages that got zero impressions but deserve some
- Publishing one comparison-structure piece per week and re-reading this report monthly
If you've read your own report, the interesting question isn't your total — it's which single page leads it, and whether you know why.
Data notes: impressions from Google Search Console's generative AI performance report, Aug 8 – Oct 30, for a marketing-tools site with roughly 150 indexed pages. Google's help doc: "Generative AI performance report (Search)" (support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139).
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