Track your performance in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google provides us with brand new information in our Google Search Consoles that tells us how our content is used in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Features in Discover. If you’ve been wondering whether your SEO efforts are actually driving these generative features, we finally have a way to view this data straight from the source.
You can walk through the features in this video with me or read on for more information on where to find this information and ideas for using it.
What the new Generative AI report looks like
If you’re in the subset of users that Google gives access to (currently rolling out mostly in the UK, but will eventually be available to everyone), you’ll see it a new section under performance called “Generative AI”. This report gives us a detailed overview of our impressions within these functions. While some have complained about only showing impressions and not clicks, rankings or CTR, we can still glean a lot of information from this.
The report allows you to filter by:
- pages
- Countries
- Devices
- Appointments
Even without click data, knowing which pages Google’s AI models find most relevant to grounding is incredibly valuable information.
Why Google is finally sharing this data
It’s important to understand that these updates don’t just come from the goodness of Google’s heart. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK was We push for better attribution and transparency. Publishers now have the ability within GSC to prevent their content from being used to support AI features, and Google is now required to ensure proper attribution through clear links in AI-generated results. This is probably why we have seen the rise of “preferred sources” and more inline links recently.
The new opt-out switch in Search Console
Google has mentioned a new toggle that will allow website owners to decide whether their website should help enable reactions in generative AI features.
photo credit, @amsterdammole on X.
This is similar to the google-extended tag in your robots.txt file, but much more accessible. You may be wondering: Why would I ever unsubscribe? I could imagine some people doing it out of principle if they aren’t fans of AI, or perhaps it could be considered if the AI is constantly getting false information about your brand. However, in these cases, you can usually resolve the issue by improving the way your business appears on your website and across the Internet.
For most of us, opting out of AI Overviews is essentially opting out of search. I would recommend sticking with it but using the data to see where you can improve.
What to do with this data?
As soon as I have access to this data, I will use it Google’s antigravity to help me analyze the pages that appear frequently in search AI features. You don’t do that need to build a tool for it. You can view the data manually. We don’t know if this data will be shown to us via the GSC API. Even if this isn’t the case, you can use Antigravity’s browser to click through GSC data and ponder why it appears so often.
Since we don’t have click data in the Generative AI report, we can use an agent to compare these pages to our standard performance data. If a page has a lot of impressions in AI overviews and also has a high click volume in regular search, we can start correlating this value.
Here’s a prompt you can use once you have this list of pages:
“What does this page have that the AI overview doesn’t? Why are people clicking through? Give me some ideas about what makes this page likely to be helpful to searchers beyond the AI answer.”
Usually, it’s because the page shows first-hand experiences, contains original images or research, or offers more insight than a simple summary can provide. Examining your pages that get high impressions in AI search features, and particularly looking at which of those pages get high clicks in search, can help us get more ideas for creating content that people are likely to find helpful.
I hope that we will all have access to this report soon. In the meantime, focus on creating non-commodity content that provides real value beyond what a simple AI summary can generate.
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