AI search data is in Search Console now. The clicks are missing, but they're coming.

I’ve been asking for this for ages, so by rights I should be thrilled. Google’s putting AI search data into Search Console. There’s a new Generative AI section in the Performance report that shows how your pages turn up in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI parts of Discover. I can’t even see it yet, it’s a UK only test for now, but I’ve read enough to know where I stand.

Start with the honest part. It gives you impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates, with data going back to 18 May. It doesn’t give you clicks, and it doesn’t give you the queries. So you can see that you showed up in an AI answer. You can’t see whether anyone came to your site off the back of it, and you can’t see what they searched to trigger it. For something living in a tab called Performance, dropping the one number that measures performance is quite a choice. Google’s official line is that it’s “continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful.” Make of that what you will.

Now the fair part, because the people calling this a solid first step are right. Until now your AI impressions were tipped into your normal totals and blended until you couldn’t pull them back apart. Separating them is genuinely new. For the first time you can see which of your pages the models actually pick up, and track your AI exposure as its own line rather than guessing. Aleyda Solis and Koray Gübür both called it a start, and that’s about the right amount of excitement.

So here’s how I’d use it. Treat it as a visibility number, not a traffic one. Put the AI impressions next to your standard report, find the pages that show up in AI a lot, then see which of those still earn ordinary clicks. The pages Google’s models keep grounding on are a map of what it trusts you for, and that’s worth having even with the click column blanked out.

Here’s the part almost nobody’s saying out loud. None of this is Google being generous. It’s the UK Competition and Markets Authority. The same order that produced this report also forces Google to give publishers impressions, clicks and click through rate, broken out per site, through Search Console, with the main rules biting in December 2026 and page level controls in March 2027. The missing clicks aren’t a permanent snub. They’re coming, because a regulator is forcing Google’s hand.

Which brings me to the other half of the announcement. UK site owners can now pull their content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and even out of being used to fine tune Google’s models, while keeping their ordinary rankings untouched. Google’s explicitly barred from downranking you for it. Publishers who feel mugged by AI summaries will take that in a heartbeat. For most of us it’s a trap with a nice handle on it. Switching off AI search to protect this month’s clicks means switching off where search is actually going, and AI Overviews already reach more than a billion people a month. I’m staying in.

That’s the real takeaway. AI search isn’t a fad you wait out. It now has its own report, its own off switch and its own regulator, and things that load bearing don’t get uninvented. The data’s thin today. I’ll take a thin first look over working blind, and I’ll take the clicks the day the CMA prises them out of Google.