Red Isle WebAn owner asked me this spring whether the AI paragraph at the top of Google was eating his phone calls, and the answer at the time was that nobody could tell him. Google's own reports lumped everything together, so a page quoted inside an AI answer looked exactly like a blue link nobody clicked. Everyone was guessing, including the people charging money to fix it.
That has changed over the summer, and most Island owners have not heard about it yet.
Google Search Console, the free tool it gives every site owner, now carries a Generative AI performance report showing how many times your pages were shown inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. You can break the numbers down by page, by country and by device. Google finished rolling the report out to every website in the world on August 31, 2026, so it is already sitting in your account waiting to be opened.
Where do I find this report?
Search Console is free, and whoever built your site has usually set it up already, so the first step is finding out whether you have an account rather than making one. Sign in at search.google.com/search-console with the Google account that owns the site and choose your property. The generative AI report sits under Performance, on its own tab beside the ordinary search results report. A missing tab means either your property is still waiting on the rollout or your pages have not turned up in an AI answer often enough to register.
What does it show, and what does it leave out?
An impression is the only thing this report counts, a link to your site shown to somebody inside an AI Overview or AI Mode. Google's help documentation describes it in those terms from top to bottom, so there are no clicks in it and nothing about what people typed to get there. Discover, the feed of articles in the Google app, has a separate report of its own.
So the report tells you whether Google's AI is putting your business in front of people, and it cannot tell you whether any of them called you afterwards. That first question has been unanswerable since the AI answers turned up, which is why the tab is worth ten minutes even in its current state. None of this covers ChatGPT or the other assistants, which still give an owner nothing to look at.
Can I stop Google's AI from using my site?
You can turn it off, and I would think hard before doing it. Search Console settings now hold a Search generative AI control with two choices, include or exclude, and every property starts on include. Excluding keeps your links and content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, Discover's AI features included, and takes a day or two to work through Google's systems. After that you get no impressions and no traffic from any of them.
Google says the control is not a ranking signal and does not affect the rest of Search, so switching it off will not damage your ordinary listings. A national publisher with a licensing argument to make has a case for it. A plumber in Stratford who wants the phone to ring is being asked to give up a place where customers might see his name, in exchange for nothing.
"Do I need to do anything about this?"
Nobody loses work because they failed to read a Search Console tab, and the report cannot tell you what to change anyway, so this is not urgent. Its value is a number you can watch across months, because a line that climbs after you rewrite your service pages is close to the only feedback available on whether the AI answers picked you up. Look at it twice a year and you have had what it offers.
If you have never opened Search Console at all, that is the more useful job, and it takes an afternoon at most. The ordinary performance report shows which searches are bringing people to your site, and owners are usually surprised by what is in that list.
The good news
None of this costs money or asks you to buy another tool, because Search Console is free and Google built the AI report into the thing you already had. The work that gets you shown in an AI answer is the same work that got you into the old blue links, pages that answer the questions customers ask and a business listing that matches, each written with the specifics only you could have supplied.
That is part of what I set up on the sites I build here at Red Isle Web, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee. Search Console verified and connected, and the pages written so they answer what people are searching for. Have a look at my work, or send me a note and I will check whether your site is turning up in Google's AI answers at all.