Google finished rolling out something worth paying attention to on August 31: a Search Console report that finally shows you how your site performs inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover, plus a single toggle that lets you disappear from all three. It went from a small UK test group in June to every website worldwide in about eleven weeks, and it lands at a moment when Sundar Pichai has already told investors that AI Overviews alone reach more than 2.5 billion people a month. That’s the scale of channel you’ve just been handed a window into, and a door out of, on the same day.

Here’s what the report actually gives you. Open the new Search Generative AI performance section in Search Console and you get impressions: which of your pages showed up inside an AI-generated answer, which countries those impressions came from, and on the main Search report, which devices. That’s genuinely useful. For a few years now, sites have been able to see AI Overviews eating into their click-through rates without any way to confirm whether their own content was even the one being summarized, or whether their traffic drop was AI Overviews at all versus something else entirely. Now you can at least confirm the first half of that question.

What you still can’t see is clicks. Google has been explicit that click data isn’t part of this report, at least not yet, with a promise to add additional metrics over time based on feedback. So the report tells you that you’re showing up inside a 2.5-billion-user surface, but not whether that visibility is doing anything for you. You can watch your impressions climb inside an AI Overview citation and have no way to connect that to a single visitor landing on your site. Visibility without value data is still a step forward from no visibility at all, but it’s worth being honest about what the number is actually telling you before anyone puts it in a client deck as a win.

Then there’s the toggle, and this is where the contradiction sharpens. Alongside the new report, Google rolled out a property-level setting that lets you exclude your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover in one move. Google’s language is direct: sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from generative AI features, full stop. The company has also been careful to say the setting won’t be used as a ranking signal anywhere else in regular Search, so you’re not trading organic rankings for AI visibility. But you are trading something: whatever share of that 2.5-billion-user surface your content was reaching, gone, in exchange for content you can no longer measure the value of anyway.

Worth separating out here, because I’ve already seen people conflate the two: this opt-out only controls whether your content can appear inside an AI-generated answer today. It has nothing to do with whether your content trains Google’s future models. That’s a different control entirely, Google-Extended, and it’s been around since 2023. Flipping the new Search Generative AI control off doesn’t touch that setting. If you actually want out of both the current answers and the future training data, you need to manage them separately, and most site owners currently checking this new toggle have no idea the second one exists.

The part I’d actually act on, if you run a site that leans on informational content: check whether your pages show up in this report at all before deciding anything about the opt-out. Google’s own help documentation admits the rollout is still uneven; sites without enough AI impressions may not see populated reports yet, even though the feature is technically available everywhere. If your report is empty, that’s not necessarily proof you’re invisible in AI Overviews. It might just mean Google hasn’t decided you have enough volume to bother showing you the number.

None of this is a reason to panic-flip the opt-out, and it’s not a reason to ignore the report either. It’s a reason to actually open Search Console this week, see whether you have data yet, and start tracking it the same way you’d track any other channel, with the honest caveat that half the picture, what that visibility is actually worth, is still missing.