On June 3, Google quietly closed one of the clearest unresolved gaps in modern search marketing. For two years, businesses had been encouraged to earn citations inside AI Overviews, the machine-written answers that now sit above the familiar list of blue links. What nobody could tell them was whether any of it worked. There was no report, no number, no scoreboard. That changed when Google announced dedicated Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, giving site owners their first official view of how often their pages appear inside AI-generated answers.
What Google actually shipped
The new report appears in Search Console under Performance, with separate views for generative features in Search, covering both AI Overviews and AI Mode, and for AI features in Discover. It records impressions: how often a URL from your site appeared inside an AI-generated answer. The data breaks down by page, country, device and date, with detail down to the hour, and the history begins on 18 May 2026.
Google is testing the report with a group of website owners in the United Kingdom before expanding it worldwide. Australian businesses are still in the queue for now, and that waiting period is more useful than it sounds.
The same announcement included a second control: a toggle that lets a site opt out of AI features entirely. Google has confirmed that switching it on carries no penalty in regular search rankings. For most businesses, though, opting out of AI answers means opting out of where a growing share of customers now get their information.
The half Google kept
Read the report closely and you’ll notice what is missing. There are no clicks, no click-through rates and no query data. You can see that your service page appeared in AI answers 4,000 times last month. You cannot see which questions triggered those appearances, or whether a single reader clicked through. Every link inside an AI Overview also shares one position in the data, so there is no way to tell whether your citation led the answer or was hidden behind a “show more” button.
That makes this a visibility scoreboard, not a traffic report. The distinction matters because the temptation will be to treat rising impressions as rising performance. They are not the same thing. Measurement across 2025 showed search impressions climbing steeply while click-through rates fell, a pattern of visibility without visits that this report now lets individual businesses observe on their own pages.
How to measure GEO visibility properly
This is where Generative Engine Optimisation, often shortened to GEO and sometimes called AEO, or answer engine optimisation, stops being guesswork and becomes measurement discipline. The new report is one instrument, not the whole cockpit. Used alone, it misleads. Used alongside two other signals, it starts to tell the truth.
The first signal is the report itself: proof of presence. Are your pages being cited inside AI answers at all, and is that number moving?
The second is GA4. Google’s AI surfaces do send some visitors through, and referral data in Analytics captures the clicks the Search Console report will not show you. The AI Assistant channel grouping in GA4 collects this traffic in one place, making it the click-side complement to the impression-side view. Presence without any downstream traffic suggests your citations are being read and absorbed within the answer itself.
The third is already in your standard Performance report. Find the queries where impressions are rising but clicks are flat or falling. That widening gap is the signature of zero-click search, and it identifies exactly which pages are feeding AI answers without earning the visit.
What Australian businesses should do before the rollout arrives
The report has not reached Australian properties yet, even though AI Overviews have been live in Australia since October 2024. Your pages have been feeding these answers for well over a year without any visibility data. The delay offers a brief advantage. The UK data begins on 18 May, meaning early adopters get no long history, only a fresh baseline. When the report lands here, the businesses that record their numbers in week one will have a trendline their competitors cannot reconstruct later.
The preparation work is unglamorous and effective: answer-first pages that state the claim in the opening paragraph, structured data that identifies entities clearly, and consistent facts across your site and profiles. Any experienced SEO agency Melbourne businesses rely on will tell you the same thing, because the sites being cited today did that work months ago.
Google has finally handed over a scoreboard. An incomplete scoreboard, honestly. The winners will be the businesses that know how to read it.
If you want to know where your brand stands in AI answers before the data arrives, Myoho Marketing runs GEO audits that map your current citation footprint and the gaps competitors are filling. As a digital marketing agency trusted by Melbourne businesses for over a decade, we build the measurement stack alongside the strategy. Book your GEO audit today.
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