Since June 2026, Search Console has included a dedicated report on your site's appearances in the answers generated by Google's AI. It tells you how many times your pages were shown in AI Overviews and in AI Mode, by country, by device and by date. It does not tell you how many clicks you got from them, nor which queries you appeared on. That is real progress, provided you know what the figure represents.

The context explains the interest. According to the SparkToro study published on 8 June 2026 (period January to April 2026), 68% of Google searches end without a single click, compared with 60.45% in 2024. Only 32% of searches still send a visitor to an external site. Until now, a business owner who saw impressions rise and clicks fall had no way to check whether AI was the cause.

For a Belgian SME, the question is not theoretical. Google switched AI Mode on in Belgium on 8 October 2025, in a wave of around 50 territories that did not include France at the time. Your customers have therefore been seeing these generated answers for almost a year, often before your French competitors. The new report is the first official tool for measuring your place in them.

What the report actually measures

The report, called the generative AI performance report, sits alongside the standard performance report. It isolates the impressions coming from the AI features of search.

The data that is really available

You get impressions only: no clicks, no click-through rate at launch. The dimensions on offer are pages (grouped by canonical URL), countries, dates (day, week or month, in Pacific time) and devices. Google also separates text-based web searches from multimodal searches, meaning those started from an image.

The point almost everyone reads wrong

Those impressions were already counted in your "Web" total. The report does not open an extra traffic channel you had been missing: it carves out a share of what you were already measuring. In other words, if your overall impressions are flat, this report will not raise them. It will tell you what proportion comes from AI.

What it does not say, and how to compensate

The limits documented by Google are clear, and they weigh on interpretation.

• No queries: there is no way to know which questions trigger your citation.

• No clicks and no CTR: you see exposure, not return.

• No access for everyone: the rollout is gradual, and at the end of August 2026 the help documentation still noted that not all properties had access.

• No API: the report is not exposed in the Search Analytics API, whose type field still accepts only web, image, video, news, discover and googleNews. No automated reporting for now.

• A 1,000 row limit and preliminary data shown as dotted lines, which can move within a few hours.

• Search Labs experiments are excluded from the count.

Compensating comes down to one habit: cross-checking the report against your landing pages in Analytics. If a page combines high AI impressions with falling organic sessions, you have a concrete case of zero-click search to deal with, not a vague impression.

What a Belgian SME does with it in practice

Google observed that the questions asked in AI Mode are on average three times longer than usual queries. That is the operational confirmation of what we keep repeating: the pages that win are those that answer precise questions, not those that pile up generic keywords.

Three profitable uses of the report, starting now:

1. Identify your cited pages to understand what the AI finds citable in your content, then apply the same recipe elsewhere (direct answer up front, FAQ, sourced and dated data).

2. Filter on Belgium to check that your exposure really happens on your market, and not on off-target traffic.

3. Compare by device, because exposure that is mostly mobile changes a site's priorities, from load time to readability.

The report also exists for Discover, in a separate version. If your content circulates there, look at both.

Frequently asked questions

Does this report mean I have lost traffic because of AI?

Not directly. It shows your exposure in the AI features, not the loss of clicks. To establish a link, compare the click trend of your most exposed pages with that of your pages with no AI exposure over the same period.

I cannot see this report in my Search Console, is it a configuration problem?

No, the rollout is gradual and not all properties have access yet. There is nothing to switch on. Simply check that your property is verified at domain level, which remains the most complete setup.

Should you block Google's AI to protect your traffic?

In most cases that is a bad calculation. Opting out of generated answers, where it is technically possible, amounts to disappearing from a surface where your competitors will stay visible. It is better to work on how citable your pages are, as explained in our article on Google's generated answers.

Priority action plan

1. Open the report in Search Console and export three months of data, before the history window limits you.

2. List your 10 most exposed pages and note those whose clicks are falling while impressions hold up.

3. Rewrite the introduction of those pages as a direct answer of two to four sentences, with a dated figure and its source.

4. Set a monthly reading of the report, filtered on Belgium, next to your usual rank tracking.

The report does not replace a strategy, it closes a blind spot. For two years, business owners have absorbed a fall in traffic with no data to explain it. You now have enough to tell apart a visibility problem, a conversion problem and a simple shift of reading towards the results page. That distinction is what decides where the budget goes.

Impressions rising but clicks falling? We analyse your AI exposure and put your organic search visibility back on queries that pay off.