As of 31 August 2026, Google's generative AI performance reports are live on all websites worldwide. That is the report showing impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, broken out by page, country and date, with device data in the Search reports. Google announced the completion here: Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Land covers the same rollout alongside a new control that lets a site opt out of those surfaces without affecting standard rankings.
It does not include click data.
That is the real change and the real limit in one line. Until now, checking whether your pages surfaced inside an AI answer meant opening a chatbot, asking, and writing down what came back, which is still the method for auditing AI visibility yourself across engines Google does not report on. Now one family of surfaces reports on itself.
Before anyone builds a habit on it, there is a second thing from two weeks earlier.
The first drop in this report was not a drop
Data starting 13 August 2026 showed a fall in impressions in the generative AI report. It had not happened. Google confirmed a logging issue, said it did not represent a change in Search visibility, and said it would add an annotation in Search Console. Search Engine Land reported it, Search Engine Roundtable had the original thread, and it was resolved a few days after being raised.
So a lot of site owners are about to open a brand new chart for the first time, scroll back through the available history, and find a decline that never occurred.
Three things that follow
Do not act on a single fall. A new report is an instrument that is still shipping. Check the dates of a dip against known issues before you rewrite a page, and wait for the annotation Google promised rather than treating the line as settled.
Impressions are not traffic. The report answers whether you were shown, not whether anyone arrived. Those two questions came apart the moment AI answers started resolving the query on the results page, and this report currently measures only the first one.
It covers Google. AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot are not in it and still have to be checked by hand, one prompt at a time.
Two more limits are worth knowing before you go looking. Google's own help pages note that not every property has access yet, and that a site without enough AI impressions may see no report at all. An empty report is not proof of invisibility. It can just mean the threshold was not met.
What to do this week
Open the report. Write down the number and the date next to it.
That is the whole task. The value is not this month's figure, which you cannot compare to anything. It is having twelve readings a year from now, taken from an instrument whose failure modes you already understand, rather than one number you found in a panic and could not put in context.
A measurement that arrives with a known bug in its first month is not a bad measurement. It is a young one. The mistake would be to treat the first chart it draws as a verdict on work you did months ago.
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