Search Console counts your AI Overview impressions but not the clicks. Rebuild the monthly report around that gap

The question you can only half answer

The question comes up in nearly every monthly marketing review now: are Google's AI answers sending us people, or taking them? It's a fair question, and today you can only answer half of it.

Here's what Search Console offers. Since August 31, 2026, every site has a Generative AI performance report. It counts impressions, meaning the times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode on Google Search. You can break that down by page, country, device and date, and filter between text searches and multimodal ones, such as Google Lens. The usual Search Console limits apply, including the 1,000-row cap in the table.

What it doesn't offer is clicks, click-through rate or queries. According to Search Engine Journal's November 2 report, clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted inside the standard Performance report as part of all web results, and none of the Search Appearance filters separates them out. So you can see how often you showed up, and you can see your total clicks, but you can't see how many of those clicks came from the AI features.

What Google and the CMA have said

Gary Illyes of Google responded to a LinkedIn post that suggested click and query data was on its way. SEJ quotes him: "I don't think we've phrased it like this. The team is super interested in giving more data, data that makes sense, but we don't have anything to announce yet."

There's a date in the background. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has set rules for Google's AI search features. SEJ reports that the CMA's summary lists "impressions, clicks, and click-through rate, aggregated across features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode" among the metrics Google must provide publishers, and gives Google until December 3 to comply. Page-level controls follow three months later. Google's first compliance report to the CMA covers June 3 to December 3 and is due January 3, 2027.

That doesn't mean click data will appear in Search Console on December 3. The CMA allows Google to comply another way, and its rules cover AI features shown to UK users. It does mean the question is likely to get louder through December, and your report should be ready for either outcome.

The rows to keep

Start with what still holds. These belong in every monthly report regardless of AI:

• Organic clicks and impressions, from the standard Performance report, by page group. This is still the main signal of whether search is working for you.
• Conversions from organic search, from your analytics, for the pages that matter to the business. If you sell, that's revenue or leads. If you publish, it's whatever your goal actually is.
• Top pages by organic clicks, with month-over-month change.
• Branded and non-branded clicks, kept separate, if you already split them. People who search for you by name behave differently from people who find you through a question, and AI answers are more likely to sit on top of the question searches.

None of those numbers has changed meaning. Clicks from AI features are already inside them. You just can't see the share.

The rows to add, and the ones to drop

Add: AI impressions by page. From the Generative AI report, list the pages that showed up most in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and how that changed. This tells you which content Google's AI is choosing to link, which is useful in its own right.

Add: the side-by-side. Next to each of those pages, put the same page's organic clicks and conversions. If a page's AI impressions rose and its clicks fell, that's worth a conversation, even though you can't prove cause. If both rose, also worth knowing.

Add: a plain note on what's missing. One sentence: "Search Console doesn't yet separate clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode; AI clicks are included in organic totals." Put it at the top of the AI section, every month, until it's no longer true.

Drop: any "AI click-through rate" you've been estimating. Some teams divide total clicks by AI impressions, or use third-party estimates, to produce a number that looks like an AI CTR. It isn't one, and it tends to become a target.

A number you can't measure is better left blank than filled with a guess that becomes next quarter's target.

Drop: AI impressions as a headline. An impression in an AI answer is a sign of visibility, not of a visit. Lead the report with what the business cares about, and treat AI impressions as context.

We wrote about who on your team can switch AI features on in Search Console. Ownership of the report deserves the same clarity: one person decides what the AI section says, and how it's worded.

When click data does arrive

If Google adds AI clicks to Search Console, whether because of the CMA or otherwise, your report is ready for it. You'll replace the plain note with real numbers, and the side-by-side rows will start to mean more.

When it happens, read the definitions before you read the numbers. SEJ notes that, under Google's help pages, a click on a link inside an AI Overview or AI Mode counts as one click, and a follow-up question in AI Mode counts as a new query. Those rules will shape any CTR you calculate. Also check whether new data covers only UK users or all users, since the CMA's rules apply to AI features shown in the UK.

Expect the first months of any new data to look odd. New reports often arrive with gaps, preliminary days and definitions that get clarified later. Give it two or three months before you draw conclusions or set goals from it, and say so in the report.

Keep the old months in the report as they were. Don't backfill estimated AI clicks for the months before the data existed.

If your site's reporting and the pages behind it need work, our web applications team builds sites and the measurement that goes with them. Get in touch and tell us which question your monthly report can't answer yet.

Related work: Spin Market.