Google has started telling site owners how often they turn up inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is one number. It is the least useful number of the set, and it is still worth understanding, because most of what has been written about it gets one important part backwards.
What the report actually is
Google announced the Generative AI performance report on 3 June 2026. There are two of them, one for Search and one for Discover. The Search version covers exactly two features, in Google's own words: "AI Overviews, AI Mode" (sourced from Search Console Help).
It carries a single metric: impressions, defined by Google as "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search." You can slice that by Pages, Countries, Devices and Dates. The Discover version drops the Devices dimension.
That is the whole report. There is no query dimension, no clicks, no click-through rate, no average position. Search Engine Journal's summary is the right way to hold it: Google has given us "a new diagnostic lens, not a new scoreboard" (sourced from Search Engine Journal).
The part most coverage gets wrong
It is easy to read all of that and conclude that Google keeps clicks from AI features hidden. It does not. It just does not put them here.
Clicks and position for both AI Overviews and AI Mode already sit inside the standard Performance report, folded into your Web search totals. Google documents this plainly: "Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click," and "An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position." The same rules apply to AI Mode (sourced from Search Console Help).
The catch is that there is no search-type filter for AI Overviews or AI Mode. The filters are still web, image, video and news. So the click data exists, blended into your Web numbers, with no supported way to pull it back out. One more wrinkle: if someone asks a follow-up question inside AI Mode, Google counts it as an entirely new query, with its own impressions, position and clicks.
That is the accurate picture. Not "Google hides your AI clicks," but "your AI clicks are already in your totals and you cannot isolate them." It changes what you can honestly conclude from the new report, which is less than most people are claiming.
You probably cannot see it yet, and that is not your fault
This one matters for Canadian businesses in particular. The report launched to a subset of site owners in the United Kingdom first, driven by regulatory requirements there, then expanded to India, the United States and Switzerland by 23 June 2026 (sourced from Search Engine Roundtable).
Canada has never been named. Not in Google's announcement, not in its Help documentation, and not in any rollout reporting I could find. Google's Help pages still carry the staged-rollout language: "We're rolling out this report to a subset of website owners, allowing for thorough testing before rolling it further."
As of 11 August 2026, John Mueller of Google confirmed it directly: "Correct, it's not yet every domain." He added a second condition that is easy to miss, which is that these reports "are only shown if there's sufficient data to display" (sourced from Search Engine Roundtable). So there are two gates, not one. Your property has to be included in the rollout, and it has to have enough impressions to render.
If you looked, saw nothing, and assumed you were invisible to AI search, stop. You may simply not have the report.
And treat the August numbers carefully
If you do have it, there is a live data-quality problem worth knowing about. Google confirmed that "a logging error caused a decrease in impressions on the Generative AI performance report in Search for data starting on August 13, 2026" (sourced from Search Engine Land). I could not confirm whether it was resolved before the end of August, so I would not draw a trend line through that stretch.
What to do with a single metric
Not much, and doing that little well is the point.
Record today's number as a baseline. Impressions are only meaningful as a direction of travel, and you cannot see direction without a starting point.
Read the Pages dimension before anything else. It tells you which of your pages the AI features are actually pulling from, which is the single most actionable thing in the report.
Set it beside your total Web clicks in the main Performance report. AI impressions rising while Web clicks fall is a pattern worth investigating, and it is the reporting-side view of what AI search is already doing to Canadian traffic. It is not proof of anything on its own, because the clicks from those features are already inside that Web total.
Do not rebuild your content strategy around it. One metric, in a staged rollout, with a known logging bug, is not a foundation.
Watch for what Google adds. It has committed to "introduce additional metrics over time," without naming which or when.
The underlying discipline here is unglamorous and it has not changed. Look at the same handful of numbers, on the same day each month, and write them down. That is most of what the 15-minute monthly SEO routine is, and it is what turns a new report from a novelty into evidence. If your site has never been checked properly against the basics, the free website audit walkthrough is the better place to start.
Which raises the real question. If Google handed you AI search impressions tomorrow, do you have twelve months of anything else to compare them against?