Google has finished rolling out two new Search Console features to every website worldwide: a generative AI performance report and a property-level toggle that lets site owners block their content from grounding AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover.
The features were first announced on June 3, 2026, in a post from Mrinalini Loew, General Manager of Google's Search Ecosystem, titled "New opportunities, control and insights for website owners". They initially went out to a subset of website owners in the UK for testing. Google later added a note to that same post confirming the global rollout was complete: "As of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out this control to all websites worldwide," as Search Engine Roundtable reported on September 1.
The generative AI performance report appears as an expandable tab inside Search Console's existing performance report. It shows impressions — how often a site's URLs appeared in AI Overviews, AI Mode, or Discover's generative AI features — broken down by page, country, device, and date. It does not include query data, clicks, click-through rate, or average position, the metrics site owners have used for years to gauge traditional search performance.
The accompanying control is a site-wide setting in Search Console. Turning it on removes a property from being used as a link or as grounding material in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover. Google says the toggle "will not be used as a ranking signal for search results" outside those generative AI features.
In the original post, Google cited the scale of its AI features: AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users. Google also said it has increased the number of inline links inside AI responses, added website preview cards, and introduced Preferred Sources and subscription labels that let users choose which sites they want to see more prominently in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google tied the work to regulatory engagement, saying it is "engaging with regulators like the UK's Competition and Markets Authority" as it builds out these controls.
What it means for brands
For the first time, brands and publishers have a standardized, Google-provided way to check whether their pages actually surface inside AI Overviews and AI Mode — at least in terms of impressions. Before this rollout, most attempts to measure Google AI visibility relied on third-party rank trackers sampling a fixed set of queries and inferring presence from the outside. Search Console's report is now the baseline every AEO measurement vendor's numbers will be compared against, and it comes directly from Google rather than a scraper.
The gap is the missing half of the picture. A brand can now see that a product page appeared tens of thousands of times inside an AI Overview in a given country last month, but not which queries triggered those impressions or whether anyone clicked through afterward. That makes it hard to tie AI-visibility work directly to revenue using Search Console alone. Marketers will still need to pair impression counts with their own referral-traffic analysis and manual query testing to reconstruct what the report leaves out.
The opt-out toggle raises a harder strategic question than it might first appear to. For most commercial sites, disappearing from AI Overviews and AI Mode also means disappearing from a growing share of Google's total query volume — a real traffic trade-off, not a neutral privacy setting. It seems more likely to be used selectively — by publishers who believe AI summaries are cutting into licensing or subscription revenue, or by sites in categories where being used as grounding material for an AI-generated answer carries legal or reputational risk — than as a default move for most brands.
The Preferred Sources and subscription-label features deserve separate attention. They point toward Google building a mechanism for individual users to explicitly favor certain publishers inside AI answers, which could eventually function as a loyalty or brand-affinity signal that sits alongside, rather than inside, classic ranking factors.
What to watch
Whether Google adds click- or query-level data to the generative AI performance report is the single biggest open question for AEO measurement; without it, brands still can't directly connect AI-Overview presence to business outcomes. Watch, too, for any data Google publishes on how many sites actually use the opt-out toggle, and in which categories — that would say a lot about how publishers are weighing traffic against control.
The regulatory backdrop is also worth tracking. The UK Competition and Markets Authority's scrutiny was the proximate driver of this rollout; whether the EU, under its own digital-markets rules, or US regulators push Google toward similar or stronger disclosure — including click-level data — could shape what other AI answer engines eventually have to reveal about how they use publisher content. Finally, watch whether Preferred Sources and subscription labels expand into a more general mechanism, since that would give brands a new, controllable lever inside AI Overviews that doesn't exist in classic organic search.
