Google starts showing UK sites how they appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode — search visibility just got a new report
Google's new Generative AI Performance report in Search Console, rolling out first to a subset of UK site owners since June 2026, shows impressions inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI-powered Discover results — while searches for terms like 'ai search tracking' are up 184% year on year, showing how fast site owners are trying to understand this shift.
25 August 2026
Google Search Console has a new report that most site owners haven’t seen yet: impressions broken down by page, country and device for how content appears inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the AI-powered version of Discover. It started rolling out to a limited group of UK-based site owners in June 2026, with a global rollout planned but no confirmed date. Click data isn’t included yet — only impressions — but it’s the first time Google has given site owners any structured visibility into whether their pages are being surfaced, and cited, inside an AI-generated answer rather than a traditional blue link.
The search data backs up how much this matters to people running websites right now: queries like “ai search tracking” and “ai rank tracking” are up 184% and 175% year on year respectively, and industry commentary has called the new report one of the most requested additions to Search Console ever.
Why this matters beyond the SEO team
AI Mode has passed a billion monthly users less than two years after launch, and query volume through it has been roughly doubling every quarter. For a growing share of searches, the traditional list of ten blue links simply isn’t what the searcher sees first — an AI-generated summary is, built from whichever pages Google’s model decided were worth citing. A site that ranks well in classic search but is invisible inside AI Overviews is losing a channel that didn’t exist two years ago and is growing fast, with no equivalent reporting until now.
So what
If your business’s marketing site or product pages haven’t been checked for this yet, and you’re a UK-based site owner, it’s worth finding out whether you have early access to the new report — and if not, worth treating “does our content get cited in AI answers” as a real open question rather than an assumption either way. This is exactly the kind of technical foundation — structured content, clean markup, fast pages — that determines whether a site is legible to AI crawlers in the first place, and it’s something we build in from the start rather than bolt on later. Get in touch if you want a read on how your site is likely to perform here, or see our approach to custom software development more broadly.