Search Console AI Overviews Report: Google Shows the Data

For two years I have watched site owners squint at Search Console traffic dips and ask the same question: “Is this an algorithm update, or is it AI Overviews eating my clicks?” Until this week, nobody at Google would answer that question with data. The official line was that AI Overviews were just part of Search, and dedicated reporting was not on the roadmap.

That line has now changed. On June 3 Google launched a dedicated Search Generative AI performance report inside Search Console, plus a separate switch that lets publishers pull their content out of AI Overviews and AI Mode without losing their organic rankings. Both shipped on the same day. Neither was widely expected.

I want to walk through what is actually in the box, what is not, and what I would do about it this week on a working WordPress or WooCommerce site. Not what Twitter says it means. What the official source actually says.

What is actually new

Google’s Search Central Blog announced the launch on June 3, 2026, in a post titled Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console. The report shows impressions of your URLs inside generative AI surfaces on Google — specifically AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, and generative AI features in Discover. It is separate from the regular Search performance report, and you can break the data down by page, country, device, and date, with hourly granularity available.

Two important caveats. First, this is impressions only. Click data is not in the report. So you can see whether your site is being cited by an AI Overview; you cannot, today, see how often that citation turned into a visit. Second, the rollout is narrow. Google has enabled the report initially for a subset of websites in the United Kingdom, a scope driven by the UK Competition and Markets Authority. Wider availability, including in the US, is planned to follow after testing.

Alongside the report, Google shipped a control I have wanted for over a year. There is now an opt-out toggle that removes your content from AI Overviews and AI Mode without affecting your position in regular Search. Until this week, your only real option was a blanket Google-Extended block, which felt heavy. The new switch is narrower and more honest about the trade-off you are actually making.

It is worth remembering where Google was on this question not long ago. In October 2024, Danny Sullivan said publicly that there were no plans for separate reporting on AI Overviews, on the grounds that AI Overviews were “part of Search” like Featured Snippets and the surface was moving too fast. Less than two years later, the position reversed. That is worth marking. Google does not usually walk back a public position quickly. It walked this one back.

Why it matters for WordPress and WooCommerce people

If you run sites for clients on WordPress or WooCommerce, three concrete things change this week.

One: when the report rolls out to your geography, you will finally be able to tell your client whether their content guide is being read by a robot or a human. A “WordPress maintenance plan” comparison page can be perfectly optimised for traditional Search, rank well, and still get its key bullet points lifted into an AI Overview that the user never clicks. That is no longer invisible. It is a chart.

Two: WooCommerce category and product pages are not in the same boat as editorial pages. Product pages tend to do badly in AI Overviews because shoppers want price, stock, shipping, reviews — things AI Overviews don’t reliably summarise. Editorial pages on a Woo blog (buyer guides, comparison posts, how-to articles) are where AI Overviews bite hardest. The new report will let you see, per URL, which side of that line each page lands on. That data should drive content strategy for the next year.

Three: the opt-out toggle is a governance question, not just an SEO knob. For a content-led site (a media brand, a publisher, an agency blog like ours) the question is: do you trade some AI visibility for less content extraction, or do you accept the citation and hope for downstream brand recall? For a WooCommerce store, the answer is almost always “stay in”, because AI Overviews shopping integrations are still maturing and being absent costs you discoverability. For a paywalled publication or a deep-research blog, the answer might be the opposite. Same toggle, different answer. WordPress already has the governance layer to handle this site by site, role by role — that is, again, why WordPress quietly keeps winning these eras.

What I would do (or not do) about it

Here is the short list I am working through with our own clients this week.

I would not panic and flip the opt-out toggle yet. The data side has not arrived for most of us, so toggling AI Overviews off without seeing what you lose is a guess. Wait for the report to land for your property. Read it for two cycles. Then decide.

I would, right now, audit which content types you actually want quoted by an AI Overview. On a WordPress agency site, the answer is usually: high-level “what is” posts, yes (they build authority); deep tutorials with code, often no (you want those clicks, not summaries). On a WooCommerce store, lift the protective gloves off your editorial blog but lock down product detail pages with proper schema so AI surfaces respect price and stock. Google’s product structured data guidance hasn’t moved, and it is still the single highest-leverage thing you can ship on a Woo storefront this quarter.

I would stop treating “AI Overviews killed my traffic” as a defensible thesis without proof. Until last week it was a vibe. Now it can be a measurement. If you maintain client reporting templates in WordPress (we ship ours as a custom Gutenberg block-pattern), add a placeholder section for the generative AI report and start populating it the moment the report shows up in the client’s Search Console. The agencies that build that habit early will look extremely sharp when every other agency is still copy-pasting old “AI is coming” decks.

I would also resist the urge to retrofit “llms.txt”, AI-friendly tags, or any other speculative AI optimisation tactic onto sites that have not yet seen the report. Most of those moves are reverse-engineered from blog posts, not from how Google actually selects AI Overview citations. The honest move is to wait for Google’s own report, read it, and react to what it shows.

The shift this week is small in interface and large in posture. Google has admitted, with a UI, that AI surfaces are different from Search and deserve their own measurement. For people who build serious WordPress and WooCommerce sites for a living, that is the first piece of honest ground we have had to stand on in two years. I will take it.