Sorta Google Finally Gives Publishers Something they call “AI Search Report”

Google has announced new Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, which is a very Google way of saying: “We moved your content into our AI blender, and now we may let you see a few dashboard crumbs.”

The new reports are supposed to show how often URLs from a site appear in Google’s generative AI features, including AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover. Site owners will reportedly be able to see impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates. Clicks? Conversions? Whether the user actually reached your site after Google answered the question for them? Let’s not get greedy, fellow peasants of the open web.

The timing is rich. Search Engine Journal recently looked at what the future of Google looks like, and the picture is not exactly “ten blue links riding into the sunset.” AI Mode, AI Overviews, rich SERP blocks, forums, maps, shopping widgets, and whatever else Google can staple onto the results page all point in one direction: more answers inside Google, fewer reasons to click away from Google.

For SEOs and publishers, the new report is still useful. Any visibility data is better than wandering around the AI SERP swamp with a broken flashlight. If your pages are being used, cited, surfaced, summarized, or quietly converted into Google-owned answer pulp, you should want to know. But let’s not pretend this solves the bigger problem. Reporting on AI visibility is not the same thing as restoring the old value exchange between Google and the sites it feeds on.

Google says the reports are rolling out first to a subset of websites while it tests and gathers feedback. That is fine. But publishers have already supplied the content, the expertise, the crawl access, and the unpaid training wheels for this new search experience. A little Search Console chart is nice. A fair click economy would be nicer.