Google finally gave us AI visibility data. Half of it.

Google announced this morning that Search Console is getting dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports, plus a toggle that lets sites opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode entirely. UK sites first, global later.

This is the data the industry has been asking for since AI Overviews launched in 2024. It's also conspicuously incomplete in exactly the way that matters most.

The reports show impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates with hourly granularity. They do not show clicks. They do not show queries. Google explicitly says it is "continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful."

That phrasing should be read carefully. It is the corporate language of "we haven't decided whether to give you this yet."

What we actually got

The new view separates AI feature impressions from everything else in the performance report. Before today, AI Overview appearances were folded into your total impressions count with no way to isolate them. John Mueller previously confirmed that every link inside an AI Overview shares a single position value in Search Console, which made the existing data close to useless for AI-specific analysis.

So the new dedicated view is a genuine improvement. You can finally see which of your pages are being surfaced in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by country and device, refreshed hourly. For sites that have been guessing at their AI visibility for the last two years, this is the first time anyone at Google has handed over a number you can actually log.

Useful. Long overdue. Welcome.

Impressions without clicks is half a metric.

That's the catch. Knowing your page appeared in an AI feature tells you nothing about whether anyone read it, clicked it, or even noticed your citation existed among the other sources Google bundled into the answer. Impressions without clicks is the digital equivalent of being told your billboard exists on a motorway without knowing the traffic volume.

The Microsoft comparison is now embarrassing

Bing Webmaster Tools launched its AI Performance dashboard in February. By March it had grounding query-to-page mapping. By May it was previewing Citation Share at SEO Week. Microsoft just announced Web IQ, a grounding API that makes Bing's index the substrate for third-party AI agents.

Microsoft has, over the last four months, built a fuller publisher-side picture of AI visibility than Google has managed in two years. The gap isn't technical capacity. Google has more data on AI Overview behaviour than any company on earth. The gap is willingness.

Which brings us to the harder question. Why is click data the one thing Google won't share?

The obvious answer is that publishing it would make the zero-click problem legible. If Google ships a dashboard showing that AI Overview impressions produce a fraction of the clicks that traditional blue-link impressions do, every publisher, advertiser, and regulator in three jurisdictions gets a number they can cite. That number is not in Google's interest.

I'm not claiming this is the reason. I'm claiming it's a reason worth holding in mind when the Search Console product team explains they're "still working out what data is most useful."

The opt-out toggle is the more interesting half

Buried in the same announcement: sites can now toggle themselves out of generative AI features entirely. No AI Overviews, no AI Mode, no AI Overviews in Discover.

Google is at pains to clarify the toggle "will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these AI features." Read that sentence twice. It rules out the toggle affecting classical organic rankings. It does not rule out it affecting anything else, and the carve-out language is doing real work.

The strategic question this creates is genuinely interesting. If you can see, in your shiny new report, that AI Overview impressions are producing essentially no useful traffic — which is plausible for many sites — do you toggle off? You'd lose the impressions. You'd presumably stop having your content paraphrased into a summary that competes with your own page. You might recapture some click-through on the standard SERP below.

Or you might lose a discovery surface that, while currently low-yield, is the surface every other search system is converging toward. Opting out of AI features in 2026 is opting out of how a meaningful share of users will search by 2028.

Nobody has the data to answer this confidently. Which is partly the point — Google hasn't given you the data to answer it confidently.

What this actually means for the reader

If you run a UK site and you're in the test cohort, three things to do this week.

Log into Search Console and check whether the new view is live for you. If it is, snapshot the baseline now — impressions by page, country, device — before you make any optimisation changes. You need a clean before-picture.

Don't touch the opt-out toggle yet. Not until you have at least 30 days of data and ideally not until click metrics arrive (assuming they ever do). Reversing the decision later is presumably possible but the indexing implications haven't been tested in public.

Stop paying for third-party "AI visibility" tools that promise to estimate what Search Console will now tell you for free. Several of the enterprise GEO platforms being sold to UK businesses right now are essentially impression estimators with a markup. Search Console just made the underlying data first-party. The tools that survive this will be the ones doing genuine citation analysis across multiple AI surfaces — not just Google's.

The wider point: the measurement problem in AI search hasn't been solved. It's been partly addressed on one surface, in one jurisdiction, with half the data missing. The asymmetry between what Merchant Center now shows and what Search Console withholds is still embarrassing. The attribution model SEO was built on is still broken.

Today's announcement is progress. It's not a fix. The industry needs to remember the difference.