Google’s Generative AI performance report in Search Console shows impressions, pages, countries, devices and a date trend. It shows no clicks, no click-through rate, no average position and no query data at all. Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report shows total citations, page-level citation counts and a sample of the grounding queries behind them. If you want to know which questions put you in an AI answer, only one of these two free tools will tell you.
By Cody Wise, Founder, Wise Media. Published 25 August 2026. Every claim below is sourced to Google or Microsoft primary documentation, verified on the day of publication.
Summary
- Google’s report launched 3 June 2026 and is still rolling out to a subset of properties. John Mueller confirmed on 11 August that it is “not yet every domain.”
- Google gives you one metric: impressions. Broken out by page, country, device and date. That is the whole report.
- Bing’s report launched 10 February 2026 in public preview and gives you citations, per-URL citation activity, and a sample of the queries that grounded them.
- Neither report gives you clicks or CTR. Anyone selling you an “AI traffic report” is describing something that does not exist.
- Bing does not name ChatGPT. Microsoft’s wording is Copilot, AI summaries in Bing, and “select partner integrations.” Do not assume the rest.
- The correction most pages get backwards: blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from AI Overviews. Google’s own documentation says it “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search.”
- Verdict for local and service businesses: stay in. The opt-out costs you impressions and buys you nothing you actually wanted.
Table of Contents
- The two reports, side by side
- What Google’s report actually ships
- What Bing’s report actually ships
- How to run both side by side
- The Google-Extended correction
- Should a local or service business opt out?
- Mistakes to avoid
- FAQ
The two reports, side by side
| Capability | Google Search Console | Bing Webmaster Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Launched | 3 June 2026 | 10 February 2026, public preview |
| Availability | Subset of properties, still rolling out | Broadly available, still labelled preview |
| Impressions | Yes | Reported as citations rather than impressions |
| Citations by URL | Pages dimension, impressions only | Yes, citation counts per URL |
| Query data | None | Yes, a sample of grounding queries |
| Clicks | No | No |
| Click-through rate | No | No |
| Average position | No | No, and position is explicitly not implied |
| Country breakdown | Yes | Not published as a named dimension |
| Device breakdown | Yes, Search results only | Not published as a named dimension |
| Query intent classification | No | Yes, added June 2026 |
| Share of voice | No | Yes, Citation Share, without naming competitors |
| Surfaces covered | AI Overviews and AI Mode | Copilot, AI summaries in Bing, select partner integrations |
The practical consequence: Google tells you that you appeared. Bing tells you what someone asked when you appeared. Those are not two versions of the same insight. Only the second one can be turned into a content decision.
What Google’s report actually ships
One metric, four dimensions. Google announced the Generative AI performance reports on 3 June 2026. The report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode. Search Labs experiments are excluded, and generative AI in Discover is a separate report entirely.
The metric and its dimensions, in Google’s own words
- Impressions. How often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features.
- Pages. Which URLs appeared within AI features.
- Countries. Visibility on a country basis.
- Devices. Which devices people were using, available for Search results.
- Dates. Performance over time. The announcement post mentions hourly granularity; the Search Console help page describes days, weeks or months. Assume daily.
What it does not ship, and why that matters
There is no clicks column, no CTR column, no average position and no queries dimension. Not hidden, not restricted, not coming with a filter. They are absent from the report and absent from Google’s documentation of it.
This is where most commentary goes wrong. A report with impressions and no clicks cannot tell you whether AI features are sending you traffic or absorbing it. It tells you that you were shown. Whether being shown was good or bad for your business is exactly the question it declines to answer, which is the same measurement gap we wrote about in why your pages rank but nobody clicks.
The detail almost nobody mentions: this data was already in your totals
Google states plainly that AI feature data “is included in the overall performance report” and is reported under the Web search type. The new report is a filtered view of numbers you already had, not a new dataset.
Two things follow. First, your AI impressions were never missing from your Search Console totals, so any consultant explaining a traffic decline as “AI traffic that Search Console does not count” has the mechanics wrong. Second, because the AI report carries no clicks, you cannot subtract it from your totals to isolate non-AI performance. The filtered view and the total are measured differently on purpose.
Why you probably still cannot see it
Because it is still rolling out. Nearly three months after launch, the Search Console help page carries this note verbatim: “We’re rolling out this report to a subset of website owners, allowing for thorough testing before rolling it further.”
On 11 August 2026, Google’s John Mueller was asked directly whether the report had gone live for everyone. His answer: “Correct, it’s not yet every domain. (Also, like the discover and news reports, these are only shown if there’s sufficient data to display.)” Search Engine Roundtable, which had reported it as fully live that morning, changed its own headline from “Live For All” to “Expands To More” the same day and appended two corrections.
So there are three separate reasons your property might not show the report, and they need different responses:
- Rollout gating. Nothing to do. Wait.
- Insufficient data. Like the Discover and News reports, it only appears where there is enough volume to display. Small sites will wait longer.
- You opted out. If the Search generative AI control is set to Exclude on the property or inherited from a parent, there is nothing to report. Check Settings before assuming it is a rollout issue.
A live data anomaly worth knowing before you draw conclusions
Google’s Search Console Data Anomalies page currently logs an unresolved issue against this exact report: “A logging error caused a decrease in impressions on the Generative AI performance report in Search for data from August 13 – August 17, 2026. This issue affects data logging only.” A separate 13 August anomaly is logged against Discover and generative AI in Discover.
If you are looking at a mid-August dip in AI impressions right now, check the anomalies page before you change anything. This is the same discipline that applies to any unexplained traffic drop: confirm the data is real before you respond to it.
What Bing’s report actually ships
Five measures, including the one Google withholds. Microsoft shipped AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools on 10 February 2026, nearly four months ahead of Google, and it is materially more granular.
The five measures
| Measure | What it reports |
|---|---|
| Total Citations | How many times your content was displayed as a source in AI-generated answers, without indicating placement or presentation within any specific answer. |
| Average Cited Pages | The average number of unique pages from your site cited per day across the selected range. |
| Grounding queries | The key phrases the AI used when retrieving your content. Microsoft states this is a sample of overall citation activity, not a complete list. |
| Page-level citation activity | Citation counts for specific URLs. Microsoft is explicit that this reflects how often pages are cited, not importance, ranking or placement. |
| Visibility trends | How citation activity changes over time across supported AI experiences. |
What Microsoft added in June 2026
On 16 June 2026 Microsoft shipped four more preview capabilities globally, and they close most of the remaining gap between a citation count and an actual content decision.
- Intents. Grounding queries classified by intent: Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation, Local and others. For a service business, the Local and Commercial buckets are the ones tied to revenue.
- Topics. Thematic clustering of the queries you are being cited for. This is the closest thing either platform offers to a topical authority read.
- Citation Share. The percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for the same grounding query. Microsoft is explicit that it does not expose competitor domains, so you get your share without knowing who holds the rest.
- Compare. Period-over-period overlay, which is what makes any of the above legible as a trend rather than a snapshot.
What Bing does not tell you, stated honestly
Three limits, and the third one is where most articles overstate the case.
- No clicks and no CTR. Same blind spot as Google. Neither platform will tell you whether a citation produced a visit. The query-level data is the differentiator, not click data.
- Grounding queries are a sample. Microsoft says so directly. Treat the list as directional, not exhaustive, and never build a content plan on the assumption that it is complete.
- It is not a ChatGPT report. Microsoft’s scope wording is “Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations.” It names no partner. The widely repeated claim that ChatGPT search runs on the Bing index is secondary reporting, not a Microsoft statement, and independent research suggests ChatGPT also draws on other sources and its own crawler. If someone tells you this report shows your ChatGPT citations, they are filling in a blank Microsoft deliberately left empty.
The report is also still labelled public preview six months in. Microsoft has announced no general availability. Plan accordingly: it is free, it is useful, and it could change.
How to run both side by side
Neither report is sufficient alone. Run them together on a monthly cadence. This takes about twenty minutes once the properties are verified.
- Verify Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not. You can import directly from Search Console, which takes a couple of minutes and does not require new DNS records.
- In Search Console, check Settings first. Confirm the Search generative AI control is set to Include or Inherit. If it says Exclude, that is why your report is empty.
- Pull the Google impressions trend and the Pages list. Note which URLs appear. That is your AI-visible page set.
- Pull Bing’s grounding queries and Topics. These are the questions your content is answering. Read them as prompts, because that is what they are.
- Cross-reference the two page lists. Pages that appear in Google’s list but not Bing’s, or the reverse, tell you where your coverage is uneven across engines.
- Filter Bing’s Intents to Local and Commercial. For a service business those are the queries closest to a purchase. Informational citations are useful for authority, but they are not the ones to optimise first.
- Check Citation Share on your five most commercially important queries. A low share on a query you are cited for means the answer is being assembled from several sources and yours is one voice among many. That is a depth problem, not a visibility problem.
- Write down the grounding query phrasing verbatim. Then check whether any page on your site answers that exact question in the first hundred words. Usually one does not. That gap is the entire content plan.
- Compare against your Search Console Web totals for the same period. Impressions up and clicks flat is the pattern to watch for. It means you are being read in the answer rather than visited.
Step eight is the one that produces results. The structural work that makes a page extractable, meaning direct answers up front, clean headings, correct schema markup and no crawl obstruction, is the same work that earns classic rankings. We made the longer version of that argument in AI citations versus backlinks.
The Google-Extended correction most Canadian pages get backwards
Blocking Google-Extended does not remove your site from AI Overviews. This is the single most repeated error in Canadian small-business SEO content, and it leads owners to block a crawler, assume they are out, and then be confused when they still appear.
What Google-Extended actually controls
Google’s crawler documentation is unambiguous. Google-Extended manages whether your content may be used for training future Gemini models powering Gemini Apps and the Vertex AI API, and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. Then it says this, verbatim:
Google-Extended does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.
Google crawler documentation, updated 14 July 2026
Every product Google-Extended governs sits outside Search. AI Overviews and AI Mode sit inside it.
Why AI Overviews are unaffected
Because eligibility for them is defined by ordinary Search eligibility. Google’s AI features documentation states that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, “a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet,” and adds that there are no additional technical requirements. AI Overviews are grounded in the regular index, crawled by Googlebot. Google-Extended never touches Googlebot.
Search Console’s own control documentation draws the same line from the other direction: the generative AI control “doesn’t affect AI training; to limit training of the models used to generate responses in Search generative AI features, use Google-Extended.” Two different levers, two different jobs.
The controls that actually do affect AI features
| Control | Effect | Collateral damage |
|---|---|---|
noindex | Removes the page from Search entirely, and therefore from AI features | Total. You lose all organic visibility. |
nosnippet | Suppresses the snippet, which removes snippet eligibility and therefore AI-feature eligibility | Severe. Your normal Search listing loses its description. |
max-snippet:[n] | Caps snippet length | Moderate, and it does not reliably exclude you. |
data-nosnippet | Excludes a specific section of a page rather than the whole page | Minimal. This is the surgical option. |
| robots.txt for Googlebot | Google’s stated control for how your site is crawled for Search | Total, and it breaks indexing. See our Cloudflare AI bot warning for how this happens by accident. |
| Search generative AI control | Property-level in or out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI in Discover | You lose AI impressions. Google states it is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal elsewhere in Search. |
One documentation gap worth flagging, because it will confuse you if you go looking. Google’s AI features page has not been updated since December 2025, which means it predates the June 2026 Search Console toggle and does not mention it at all. If you read only that page you will conclude the toggle does not exist.
Should a local or service business opt out?
No. Stay in. The opt-out was built for publishers whose business model is the pageview. If you sell a service, an appointment or a quote, being summarised in an AI answer with your name attached is closer to advertising than to theft.
Where the toggle came from, and what it actually does
Google announced the control on 3 June 2026, the same day the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed a publisher conduct requirement on Google under the digital markets competition regime. The CMA required Google to give publishers effective controls over the use of their search content in generative AI, and clear metrics on engagement with it. Google has nine months from that date to implement all changes. No specific compliance deadline date appears in the CMA’s own announcement, despite several dates circulating in secondary coverage.
Practical detail on the control itself:
- It lives at Settings, then Search generative AI in Search Console.
- Three states: Include, Exclude, or Inherit control from parent. It cascades down the property tree, so a domain-level Exclude silently applies to every subproperty.
- Google states sites that opt out “will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.”
- Google states the control “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search.”
- Exclusion takes effect within one to two days, though caching and propagation can extend that.
- It launched to a subset of UK owners and has since expanded. Google’s live help page no longer names a country, but it still describes a subset rollout.
The case for staying in, for a service business
- Your content is not the product. A roofer’s service page being summarised does not cannibalise a sale. A magazine’s feature being summarised does.
- Attribution is the point. Appearing as a cited source in an answer to “who does X in Calgary” is a qualified impression, not a lost pageview.
- You cannot measure what you opted out of. Exclude and both reports go quiet. You lose the visibility and the data about the visibility.
- The blast radius is wider than the toggle suggests. Inheritance means an Exclude set once at the domain level affects properties nobody remembers configuring.
The honest exception: if your revenue genuinely comes from ad impressions on long-form editorial content, the calculus is different and the opt-out exists for you. That is a small minority of Canadian businesses, and if it describes you, you already know it.
Mistakes to avoid
- Reading Google’s report as a traffic report. It has no clicks. It cannot tell you whether AI features helped or hurt.
- Subtracting AI impressions from your Search totals. The AI data is already inside those totals and is not measured the same way. The arithmetic does not work.
- Blocking Google-Extended to get out of AI Overviews. It does not do that. You will lose Gemini grounding and keep every AI Overview appearance you had.
- Treating Bing’s grounding queries as complete. Microsoft says it is a sample. Directional, not exhaustive.
- Claiming Bing’s report covers ChatGPT. Microsoft names Copilot, Bing summaries and unnamed partner integrations. Nothing more.
- Ignoring Bing because it is small. Your reason for using Bing Webmaster Tools has nothing to do with Bing’s search share. It is the only free source of query-level AI citation data that exists.
- Panicking at a mid-August dip. Google has an open logging anomaly on this report for 13 to 17 August 2026. Check the anomalies page first.
- Assuming the report is missing because of a bug. Check the generative AI control in Settings before you file anything. An inherited Exclude looks identical to a rollout delay.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google Search Console show which queries triggered an AI Overview citation?
No. The Generative AI performance report exposes impressions broken out by page, country, device and date. There is no query dimension, no clicks, no CTR and no average position. Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report does show a sample of the grounding queries behind your citations.
Why can I not see the Generative AI performance report in my Search Console?
Three possible reasons. It is still rolling out to a subset of properties, confirmed by Google’s John Mueller on 11 August 2026. It only displays where there is sufficient data, like the Discover and News reports. Or your property has the Search generative AI control set to Exclude, possibly inherited from a parent property.
Does blocking Google-Extended remove my site from AI Overviews?
No. Google’s crawler documentation states that Google-Extended “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.” AI Overviews are grounded in the ordinary Search index crawled by Googlebot. Google-Extended governs Gemini Apps and Vertex AI, which sit outside Search.
Does Bing’s AI Performance report show my ChatGPT citations?
Microsoft does not say so. Its stated scope is “Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations,” and it names no partner. Any claim that the report covers ChatGPT is an inference, not a Microsoft statement.
Is AI Mode traffic counted in my normal Search Console performance report?
Yes. Google states that data from AI features is included in the overall performance report, under the Web search type. The Generative AI report is a filtered view of numbers already in your totals rather than a separate dataset.
Should a small local business opt out of AI Overviews?
Generally no. Opting out removes your impressions from AI features and removes the reporting alongside them, while a cited mention in an answer to a local service question functions as a qualified impression. The opt-out was designed for publishers monetising pageviews, which is a different business model.
Are either of these reports free?
Yes, both. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free, and Bing Webmaster Tools can import your verified properties directly from Search Console, which takes a few minutes.
Do either of these reports show clicks from AI answers?
No. Neither Google nor Microsoft publishes click or click-through-rate data for AI answers. Any tool or agency presenting an “AI traffic” number is modelling it, not measuring it, and you should ask how.
The bottom line
Use Google’s report to confirm you appear and to see which pages do it. Use Bing’s report to learn what people are actually asking. Then do the only work that changes either number: answer those exact questions clearly, early on the page, on a site that crawls cleanly.
Neither platform will tell you whether it produced revenue. That gap is not going to close soon, so keep your own attribution honest and stop treating impressions as an outcome.
Want this run for your site?
Wise Media builds and grows websites for Canadian founders and service businesses out of Calgary. We set up both reports, read them together every month, and turn the grounding queries into pages that actually answer them.
Start with the intake form and tell us what you are trying to rank for. If the underlying site is the constraint, our website growth packages cover the technical and content work, and if you are diagnosing something first, start with indexed but not ranking.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, 3 June 2026.
- Google, Generative AI performance report help documentation, including the subset rollout notice.
- Google, Search generative AI control.
- Google, Search Console data anomalies, including the 13 to 17 August 2026 logging error.
- Google, AI features and your website.
- Google, Google-Extended crawler documentation, updated 14 July 2026.
- Microsoft, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, 10 February 2026.
- Microsoft, New AI visibility insights: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare, 16 June 2026.
- Google, New controls for website owners, 3 June 2026.
- UK Competition and Markets Authority press release, 3 June 2026.
- Search Engine Roundtable, 11 August 2026, for the John Mueller quote and the published correction.