You’ve been trying to tell whether AI shows your pages, and there was no official number for it. Google Search Console now reports how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The Generative AI performance reports were announced on 3 June 2026 and rolled out worldwide on 31 August 2026. You get impressions, broken out by page, country, device and date, and those four are the whole dimension list. Clicks, queries, and mentions with no URL stay outside the report.
What the reports count
Google’s help documentation defines an impression as how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. There is no click data and no query data, so you can see a page appeared while what was asked stays out of view, and so does whether anyone came. Search Labs experiment data is excluded because those experiments are still in active development.
In our opinion, the missing clicks are the annoying part. An impression count says you were in the room and nothing about whether it did anything. The count is official, so “does AI show my pages” stops being a third-party estimate, and existing third-party AI Overview trackers now have something official to check against.
Coverage is Google’s own surfaces only, AI Overviews and AI Mode. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity appear in no Google report. A separate Search generative AI control shipped the same day as the worldwide rollout. It excludes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI in Discover without removing it from ordinary Search, and Google says that control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search.
Mentions with no link
Search Console counts URL impressions. An AI answer that names a brand in prose with no link attached produces no URL, so no impression anywhere. The brand can sit in the sentence the user actually reads and Search Console still has nothing to increment.
Over the 30 days from 6 August to 4 September 2026 we logged 2,265 AI answers. 300 of them cited the brand with a link and 66 named the brand in prose with no link, which is 366 mentions in total. The brands sit in competitive categories, on the questions buyers actually ask, and this is a benchmark sample, directional, not a law of the web.
Across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on the same shared sample, 234 mentions cited the brand with a link and 46 named it with no link, so 16.4 percent of mentions arrived with no link at all. 710 of those answers were ChatGPT, 557 Gemini, 579 Perplexity. Google AI Mode and Claude were also logged in this window but on too few brands to compare fairly, so they are left out of the per-platform figures rather than reported thin.
| Platform | Cited with a link | Named with no link | Share with no link |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 63 | 36 | 36.4 percent |
| Gemini | 78 | 8 | 9.3 percent |
| Perplexity | 93 | 2 | 2.1 percent |
The spread between ChatGPT and Perplexity was wider than we expected. On ChatGPT more than a third of mentions are invisible to any URL-impression counter, and on Perplexity almost none are. We do not know why. Perplexity’s interface is built around showing sources and ChatGPT’s is not, which would fit, but that is a guess rather than something we measured.
Appearing and being recommended
The report is days old at the time of writing, so nobody has a meaningful trend out of it yet, including us. Treat the new report as one surface among several, and do not read a flat impression count as evidence of being recommended. A page appearing in an answer and a brand being recommended in an answer are different events, and only one of them makes a URL for Search Console to count.
