Search Console now reports how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it counts impressions only.
Google announced Generative AI performance reports on 3 June 2026 and rolled them out worldwide on 31 August 2026. 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. The counts break down by page, country, device and date. Those four are the whole dimension list. The query that produced the answer is outside the report, and so is any signal that someone followed the link.
Search Labs experiment data is excluded. 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 report covers Google’s own surfaces, AI Overviews and AI Mode. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity appear in no Google report.
A control that arrived with the numbers
A separate Search generative AI control shipped the same day. It excludes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI in Discover without removing it from ordinary Search. Google says that control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search.
The useful part is the official count itself. Google reporting this itself means “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.
A name in the answer, no URL to count
Search Console counts URL impressions. An AI answer naming 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.
Semrush published the Ghost Citations study on 9 June 2026. Semrush counted 3,981 brand appearances across 115 prompts in 14 countries. 61.7 percent were cited without the brand being named. 25.1 percent were the reverse, named with no citation. 13.2 percent were both. The 25.1 percent is the number that matters here. A brand named with no link is the case Search Console cannot see at all.
Semrush also split the pattern by engine. ChatGPT had an 87 percent citation rate and a 20.7 percent mention rate. Gemini sat close to inverted, 21.4 percent citation and 83.7 percent mention.
Writesonic ran a larger pass, reported by Search Engine Land on 29 July 2026: about 16 million brand appearances over 30 days, and around 40 percent of AI citations did not name the source brand. Writesonic’s ghost citation rate by engine:
| Engine | Ghost citation rate |
|---|---|
| Perplexity | 52 percent |
| Google AI Mode | 49 percent |
| Google AI Overviews | 41 percent |
| ChatGPT | 37 percent |
| Gemini | 25 percent |
| Grok | 22 percent |
| Microsoft Copilot | 19 percent |
Google AI Mode at 49 percent and AI Overviews at 41 percent are the two surfaces this new report covers, so the blind spot sits inside the thing Google is now reporting on.
BrightEdge reported that ChatGPT mentions brands about 3.2 times more often than it cites them.
These studies do not share a denominator. Semrush counted brand appearances across prompts, Writesonic counted brand appearances at a much larger scale, BrightEdge reported a ratio. Compare direction rather than lining the percentages up against each other.
Two failure modes, one name
We find this odd: two different failure modes get discussed as one thing under the name ghost citations. Being cited without being named costs you the credit. Being named without a link costs you the click and the impression, and it is the one no report on Google’s side can count. A citation with no name can still produce a URL, and a URL can still produce an impression. A name with no link produces no URL at all.
How much any of this moves is unknown with a report this new. Nobody has a trend from it yet.
Treat the new report as one surface among several. 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.
