How to Track AI Overviews and AI Mode Traffic: What Search Console Now Shows, and What It Cannot

Here is how to track AI Overviews: open Google Search Console and go to Performance, Generative AI. The report shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and day. Google rolled this report out to all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026 [1]. It counts impressions only. For clicks, compare the same pages in the main Performance report and in Google Analytics, then fill the remaining gaps with fixed-prompt checks.

This guide walks through each of those steps using anobee.com's own Generative AI report, read on 18 October 2026, and shows where the numbers stop.

Method note: Every screen and figure from anobee.com in this guide was read in Search Console and GA4 on 17 and 18 October 2026. Google labels the Generative AI report Beta, so its layout and filters may change.

How to track AI Overviews in Search Console

The Generative AI performance report is the only Google tool that isolates AI Overviews and AI Mode at all. Here is how to read it.

1. Open the report. In Search Console, select your property, open Performance, then Generative AI. If it is missing, Google says the site usually has not had enough impressions in generative AI features yet. The other cause is that the site has been excluded from those features [1].
2. Pick a date range. The presets are 24 hours, 7 days, 28 days and 3 months, with more under More. Dates are in Pacific Time [1], which matters if you compare days with GA4 in another time zone.
3. Choose a tab. Pages shows which URLs were linked. Countries, Devices and Days show where and when.
4. Filter if you need to. Add filter offers Page, Country and Device. Search type offers Web, either text-based or multimodal. Multimodal covers searches from Google Lens, Circle to Search, uploaded images and Chrome image search [1].
5. Export. The Export button downloads the chart and table. Values shown as ~ or a dash become zeros in the file [1].

What the report counts

What anobee.com's Generative AI report showed

anobee.com's report for 16 July to 15 October 2026 showed 1.78K impressions, read on 18 October 2026. Three patterns stood out.

One page carried most of it. The earn-online-in-Nepal guide had 1,023 impressions on its trailing-slash URL and 124 on the URL without the slash, 1,147 in total. The affiliate marketing in Nepal guide was second, also split across two URLs (147 and 35). Google says report data is assigned to the canonical URL [1]. However, both versions appeared as separate rows. If your site has a trailing-slash split, add both rows before you judge a page.

The audience was local and mobile. Nepal accounted for 1,367 impressions, with the United States next at 68. By device, mobile had 1,035, desktop 725 and tablet 15.

The trend fell sharply. From mid-August to mid-September, daily impressions ran mostly between 20 and 45. For most of late September and early October they stayed under 10 a day. GA4 showed the same page's Google organic sessions falling from 15 to 2 between 18 August to 16 September and 17 September to 16 October. The report shows that the drop happened. It cannot show whether AI Overviews stopped showing the page or the page stopped ranking, because it has no query or position data.

What Search Console cannot tell you about AI Overviews

Google's help is clear on clicks. Clicking a link to an external page in an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts as a click, and a follow-up question in AI Mode counts as a new query [2]. Those clicks are inside your normal Performance report totals [3]. Because of that, no filter can pull them back out.

How to track AI Overviews traffic, page by page

Without a click metric, how to track AI Overviews traffic comes down to a page-level comparison. It gives you a likely signal, not an exact count.

1. List the pages with AI impressions. In the Generative AI report, open the Pages tab for the last 3 months and export it.
2. Check the same pages in the main Performance report. Filter by each page and compare clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for the same dates. For example, a page with steady impressions but falling clicks after AI impressions grow is a candidate for clicks lost to the AI answer.
3. Check engagement in GA4. In GA4, look at the landing page's Organic Search sessions, engagement rate and key events for the same dates. Google suggests combining Search Console and Analytics data this way [4], and notes that conversions and time on site can be tracked in Analytics [3].
4. Note what changed on the page. Edits, redirects and title changes explain many shifts that look like AI effects.

Take anobee.com's earn-online-in-Nepal guide. Its 1,147 AI impressions were about a third of its 3,629 Web impressions in Search Console over nearly the same three months. That share is the useful number: it tells you how much of a page's visibility now passes through AI features.

Why GA4 cannot separate AI Overviews and AI Mode

GA4 has an AI Assistant channel, but it does not help here. Google's channel definitions say it covers sources such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok, and excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode [5]. As a result, a visit that starts from a link in an AI Overview arrives as Google organic traffic, in the Organic Search channel, alongside every other Google result.

anobee.com's GA4 showed 45 AI Assistant sessions in the 30 days to 16 October 2026, 41 of them from chatgpt.com. None of those can come from Google's AI features. In short, the AI Assistant channel measures chatbots. It is not a measure of AI Overviews.

Use fixed-prompt checks to fill the gaps

Search Console tells you that AI features showed your page. It does not tell you what they said or which competitor was cited instead. That is the part of how to track AI Overviews that no report covers. For that, run the same searches yourself on a fixed schedule.

1. Pick 5 to 10 queries your page targets, and write them down exactly.
2. Search each one in a signed-out browser, in the country you care about, and record whether an AI Overview appeared and whether your page was linked.
3. Ask the same queries in AI Mode and record the linked sources.
4. Repeat on the same day each week, and keep a screenshot of every result.

Anobee runs this kind of check in its AI Citation Index. Across three runs of one fixed branded prompt in September 2026, Google AI Mode cited anobee.com zero times. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cited it in every run. The guide to checking AI citations covers the method across all assistants. For how the overviews choose their sources in the first place, see how Google AI Overviews work.

A weekly routine for tracking AI Overviews

This is how to track AI Overviews week to week once the report is set up.

If AI impressions are rising while clicks on the same pages fall, the zero-click search strategy guide covers what to change on the page.