Big SEO News!

Google will soon be rolling out dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console today, giving site owners a standalone view of how their pages appear inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. If you've read anything I've put out over the last few months you can probably guess my reaction, because it split neatly into two halves.

Here's the snapshot Google Search Central released:

Notice anything missing?

No click data Google? I understand the logic of showing impressions but surely click reporting is possible for AI overviews, AI mode etc? after all they do cite and reference sources....

So my thoughts are, good, it's about time. We've spent the last year measuring our presence in AI Overviews by relying on third party tools which are sketchy at the best of times, and a lot of that data is, to put it politely, invented or scraped. First party numbers straight from Google is a real step forward, but, only if we can actually do something with the data.

We have to look at the relationship between impression and what that ultimately leads to (more clicks hopefully)

Second half: it's impressions only. No .click data. No query data either - so, the only thing we'll be able to make from this is how often our pages are being referenced, not how many times they are clicked nor what prompts generated them.

I'm not the only SEO thinking Google GIVE US THE F******* Click data and segment it out in search appearance, it's not hard is it?

The crazy thing is Google HAS the data, AI overview clicks are blended in with standard GSC performance reporting data.

So why aren't they giving it?

Perhaps this is just the first iteration of the reporting and that down the line Google search central will look at rolling out the keyword data used to generate the result along with any associated clicks.

We'll still be relying on Google Analytics 4 to see traffic from Google, but, we can only segment out Gemini, so AI overview clicks and AI mode clicks will still be "unattributable" at this point:

If you want to see what your LLM traffic looks like (including Google Gemini) you can do this quickly and easily by going to your Google Analytics profile, go into REPORTS > Acquisition > Traffic Acqusition

and then applying a filter for SESSION SOURCE, selecting session source and then selecting matches partial regex >

and then providing this value:
chatgpt|chat\.openai|openai|perplexity|gemini\.google|gemini|bard|copilot|bing.*chat|claude\.ai|anthropic|you\.com|poe\.com|deepseek|grok|x\.ai|mistral|le\.chat|huggingface|character\.ai|phind|kagi|meta\.ai|llama|writesonic|jasper

and then applying it.

So what is actually launching?

Let's get the facts down before the opinion, because, well, why not.

Google is going to be adding a separate view in Search Console for visibility inside generative AI features, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode on Search plus generative AI in Discover. That same data was already sitting inside your overall performance report; this just splits it out so you can see it on its own - as SEOs, we've complained about Google not segmenting this data out for some time now.

AI Overviews have been out in the wild for 2+ years now, all we can do is use the traditional search console data to look at queries, clicks etc. but, we cannot ascertain how much of it is via Google AI overviews - which is a real bugbear considering Google HAS the information.

It makes you wonder - why don't they want to give it?

The reports give you five things: impressions inside AI features, pages, countries, devices (Search only), and dates down to hourly granularity. What they don't give you is clicks, and they don't give you query level data. Google has said it's working with site owners on what to add over time, so more metrics may follow.

It's also not live for everyone. Both this and a second feature are rolling out to a subset of UK site owners first, and there's no confirmed date for a global rollout, More on why it's the UK shortly.

That second feature is arguably more interesting than the report itself. Google is testing a toggle that lets you opt your site out of appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Opt out and you get no impressions or traffic from those generative features, and Google says the toggle won't be used as a ranking signal for normal search results.

Why is Google not giving us click data?

My theory here is that they are working on a damage limitation basis, the idea is they give us VISIBILITY data (impressions) as a "stop gap", they HAVE the click data but the fact they haven;t included it in their GSC AI reporting snapshot suggests its not likely to be there on the initial release.

COULD IT BE THAT AI OVERVIEWS decimated traffic and that reporting it to users gives the SEO community ammunition?

Possibly, if we look at what Liz Reid said -

She said clearly:

  • In an August 2025 Google blog post she wrote that "we're actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago" - defining quality clicks as those where users don't quickly click back, typically a signal that a user is interested in the website.

  • Earlier, at AI Overviews' launch, Reid proclaimed that AI Overview links would deliver more clicks and "valuable traffic to publishers and creators."

  • In an FT interview she framed the mechanism as bringing friction down so people search more, opening up new opportunities for websites, creators and publishers and they get higher-quality clicks.

So Liz went from saying AI OVERVIEW links would deliver more clicks to "more quality clicks", that doesn't mean more clicks, it could mean you get half the amount of clicks but better quality ones/

But the SEO community is not stupid! AI Overviews have ABSOLUTELY DECIMATED clicks to the open web >

We're seeing it everywhere - the MORE AI overviews are rolled out (more queries) the less clicks website get.

And to measure click quality?

Not sure I agree with the sentiment from Google that AI overviews lead to higher quality clicks, we didn't see traffic half but conversions remain stable or increase.

There are SO many studies out there and examples of how AI overviews has been decimating traffic to everything from publishers to websites that relied on blogs.

Even AHREFS did studies and we see CTR impact from AI overviews is staggering, in 1 year alone we see click losses mount from 34% to 58%.

So could Google be treading carefully here?

They;re not even revealing query data? why, Bing webmaster tools has it

Alright, we see citations but we don't see how many clicks were generated, but at least with Bing we see the grounding queries where the client website was cited.

Bing makes it clear that keyword and pages data is only available for traditional search in BING and not for chat or other verticals (AI)

Anyhow!

Google Search Central - will they launch click data at a later date? will we get the segments so we can see clearly the relationship between AI inclusion and clicks?

To me, CITATIONS or IMPRESSIONS for AI Features is great n all, but, it doesn't REALLY give us data that's meaningful.

Will they release query and click data at a later date?