Search Engine Optimization

Google Search Console in 2026: the practical guide, including how AI Overviews and AI Mode are reported

Updated 13 min readBy Jaskirat Singh Talwar

A dark dashboard with a gauge, a line chart and small panels in orange and white

Google Search Console is still the only place Google tells you, for free, which queries and pages bring you clicks and whether it can crawl and index your site. In 2026 it also shows how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode: those impressions sit in the normal Performance report under the "Web" search type, and since 3 June 2026 there is a dedicated "generative AI features" view, which reached all websites on 31 August 2026. Google's own guidance is that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode", so the job in Search Console is the same as it always was: verify the right property, fix what the indexing and page-experience reports flag, and read the Performance report on a routine.

Key takeaways

  • Search Console keeps 16 months of data. Anything older is gone unless you export it (the Looker Studio connector, the API at up to 25,000 rows per request, or the daily bulk export to BigQuery).
  • AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is "reported on in the Performance report, within the 'Web' search type" (Google, "AI features and your website", updated 10 Dec 2025). The dedicated generative AI report launched on 3 June 2026 shows impressions only, by page, country, device and date; it has no clicks or position.
  • A "multimodal" search type was added on 24 September 2026 for results triggered by images: Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search and Chrome's "Search this image".
  • Late-2025 additions worth switching on: the branded/non-branded query filter (20 Nov 2025, "determined by an internal, AI-assisted system"), weekly and monthly views, custom annotations, and an experimental natural-language report configuration (4 Dec 2025, limited rollout).
  • Page indexing, URL Inspection, Sitemaps and Core Web Vitals are the four reports that catch most migration and redesign damage. Validation after a fix "typically takes up to about two weeks".

What Search Console is, and what it is not

Search Console is a free, owner-verified service. You do not need it for Google to index your site, but without it you only see Google's behaviour through analytics referrals and guesswork. It answers four questions: which queries show your pages (and where), which pages Google has indexed and why others were left out, whether pages meet the page-experience thresholds, and whether Google has flagged security or spam problems.

It is not an analytics tool (it has no sessions, conversions or on-site behaviour; pair it with GA4), it does not cover other search engines or AI assistants outside Google, and it does not keep history: the retention window is 16 months, which is why the export options later in this guide matter.

Step 1: set up the right property and verify it

Google offers two property types. A Domain property (example.com) covers every protocol and subdomain: Google's help page says Domain properties "include data for all protocol (http/https) and subdomain variations of your property", and that "verifying ownership of a root domain automatically verifies ownership of all subdomains". A URL-prefix property (https://www.example.com/) covers only that exact prefix.

For a business site, create the Domain property first and add a URL-prefix property for the live hostname if you want per-host reports. Verification methods:

Method Works for What it needs
DNS record (TXT or CNAME) Domain and URL-prefix Access to the domain's DNS; the record must stay in place after verification
HTML file URL-prefix only Upload a file to the site root; it must be publicly accessible without cross-domain redirects
HTML <meta> tag URL-prefix only Edit the <head> of the home page as seen by a logged-out visitor
Google Analytics URL-prefix only The gtag.js snippet in the home page <head> and Edit rights on the GA account, same Google account
Google Tag Manager URL-prefix only The container snippet with the <noscript> block right after <body>, and Publish or Admin rights

If your site runs behind a CDN or edge layer, check that the verification file or tag is not cached from an old version, and that the robots rules at the edge match robots.txt. Google's AI-features guidance is explicit that crawling must be allowed "in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure".

Step 2: know which report answers which question

Report Question it answers When to look
Performance (Search results) Which queries and pages get impressions and clicks, at what position, on which device and country; filters for web (text-based or multimodal), image, video and news Weekly, and after any content change
Generative AI features (since Jun 2026) How often URLs appeared inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative features Monthly; compare with the citation panel described in our GEO guide
Performance (Discover, Google News) Whether Google surfaces your content outside the search box Monthly, publishers mainly
Page indexing How many URLs are indexed, and the reason for each one that is not After launches, migrations and monthly
URL Inspection What Google has indexed for one URL, a live test, and a request to index Per-URL checks, new or fixed pages
Sitemaps Whether your sitemaps were fetched and parsed, and how many URLs they list After every deploy that changes URLs
Core Web Vitals Which URL groups pass or fail LCP, INP and CLS on real-user (CrUX) data Monthly, and after template changes
HTTPS Which indexed URLs are served over HTTPS After certificate or hosting changes
Removals Temporarily hide a URL from Google results Emergencies only
Manual actions, Security issues Whether Google has penalised or flagged the site Any email alert; monthly glance
Links External sites and pages linking to you, and internal link counts Quarterly
Insights A summary of top content, trending pages and queries, with milestones For non-specialists

Step 3: read the Performance report properly

The report has four metrics. In Google's definitions, clicks are "the number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results", impressions count how often your site appeared, CTR is clicks divided by impressions, and average position is "the average position of the topmost result from your site". Three habits make the report useful:

  • Compare periods, not snapshots. Use the 28-day or 3-month ranges against the previous period, and use the weekly and monthly views added in December 2025 for trend lines without daily noise. The 24-hour view shows hourly points but, in Google's words, hourly data points "include preliminary data".
  • Separate brand from non-brand. The branded queries filter (20 November 2025, now "available to all eligible sites") splits the data into queries "that include your brand name or closely associated products" and everything else. It is "determined by an internal, AI-assisted system", not by a keyword list, and Google notes "some queries may occasionally be misidentified". It is limited to top-level properties with enough volume.
  • Look at pages with impressions and no clicks. A page with thousands of impressions, a position of 6-12 and a low CTR has a title or snippet problem, not a ranking problem. That was true in the 2016 version of this guide and is still the fastest win available.

Two experimental additions: an AI-powered configuration (4 December 2025) lets you "describe the analysis you want to see in natural language" and turns it into filters and comparisons, on Search results only and for a limited set of sites; and query groups (27 October 2025) cluster similar queries in the Insights report for properties with large query volumes.

Step 4: understand how AI features are reported

This is the part most 2016-era guides lack. Google's documentation says sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode "are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console", "reported on in the Performance report, within the 'Web' search type". There is no separate search type for AI answers, so a click from an AI Overview citation and a click from a blue link both count as web clicks.

On 3 June 2026 Google added "dedicated views of your impressions within generative AI features on Search", covering "AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as generative AI features in Discover". The dimensions are pages, countries, devices and dates ("hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity"). The only metric is impressions: Google defines it as "how often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover". There are no clicks and no position, which is why the report tells you about visibility, not traffic. Google's announcement says the data "is included in the overall performance report"; the new view just isolates it. The rollout began with a subset of sites; Google's update note reads "as of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide".

On 24 September 2026 Google added a multimodal search type for web results from image-led searches: "Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search" and "the Chrome right-click 'Search this image' feature". It appears as a filter in the Performance report and also in the generative AI features report. Coverage of the launch reports that these rows carry no query text, because the search was made with a picture rather than words.

What to do with this: nothing special. Google's page states "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary", and lists ordinary practice: "making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page", "checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date", and allowing crawling at the CDN. Track the generative AI impressions monthly next to your own prompt panel, and treat them as a leading indicator for the citation work described on our AI search visibility page.

Step 5: run a monthly routine

  1. Alerts first. Open Manual actions and Security issues. Both should read "No issues detected".
  2. Page indexing. Check the indexed count against the sitemap count. Open the "Why pages aren't indexed" table; the Source column tells you whether the cause is on Google's side or yours. Expected exclusions (canonicalised duplicates, deliberately blocked pages) are fine; unexpected "Not found (404)" or "Redirect error" rows are not.
  3. Sitemaps. Confirm every sitemap shows "Success" and a recent last-read date. Limits to remember: 50 MB uncompressed per sitemap, and a sitemap index may not list more than 50,000 sitemaps.
  4. Core Web Vitals. Any URL group that fails on mobile needs a ticket. The thresholds Google reports as "Good": LCP 2.5 seconds or less, INP 200 milliseconds or less, CLS 0.1 or less, "as measured by actual user data" from the CrUX report.
  5. Performance, 28 days vs previous. Filter to non-branded queries. List the ten pages that gained and lost the most clicks, and the ten queries with high impressions and a CTR below the site average.
  6. Generative AI features. Record total impressions and the top ten pages. Note any page that appears here but has falling web clicks: AI answers may be absorbing its traffic, which is a prompt to make the page more worth clicking, not to remove it.
  7. URL Inspection on the pages you changed. Confirm the indexed version matches what you published. If not, request indexing; Google warns "submitting a request does not guarantee that the page will appear in the Google Index" and that "indexing typically takes only a day or so, but can take much longer in some cases". There are daily limits per property, so for many changed pages submit an updated sitemap with <lastmod> instead.
  8. Export. Save the month's Performance export so you keep history beyond 16 months.

After a migration or redesign

Search Console is where you find out whether a relaunch kept its rankings. Add the new sitemaps and remove the old ones; watch Page indexing for "Page with redirect" rows (expected for old URLs) and for "Not found (404)" rows (not expected); inspect the twenty most valuable old URLs to confirm the redirect target is indexed; re-check Core Web Vitals after 28 days, because the report uses real-user data and lags the deploy. Do not use the Removals tool to tidy old URLs: Google says "a successful request lasts only about six months" and the tool "alone won't work" for permanent removal. Our guides to 301 redirects and the pre-relaunch audit cover the rest of the checklist.

Getting the data out

  • Looker Studio connector: the easiest way to build a dashboard that keeps history.
  • Search Analytics API: rowLimit has a "valid range" of "1–25,000" with a default of 1,000; dimensions are country, device, page, query and searchAppearance, plus date and hour; the type parameter accepts discover, googleNews, news, image, video and web.
  • Bulk data export to BigQuery (February 2023): a daily export that "includes all your performance data, apart from anonymized queries"; only property owners can set it up, the first export starts within 48 hours, and it does not backfill. Google positions it for large sites; for a mid-size business site the connector or the API is enough.

FAQ

Does Search Console show clicks from AI Overviews separately?

No. Google reports AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic inside the Performance report under the "Web" search type, mixed with classic results. The generative AI features view added on 3 June 2026 isolates impressions from those features by page, country, device and date, but it carries no clicks or position.

How long does Search Console keep data?

Sixteen months. Data older than that is deleted and cannot be recovered, so keep a Looker Studio dashboard, periodic exports, or, for large sites, the daily bulk export to BigQuery, which only collects data from the day it is enabled.

Should I use a Domain property or a URL-prefix property?

Create a Domain property, verified through a DNS record. It aggregates http, https, www and every subdomain, so nothing is missed after a hosting or protocol change. Add URL-prefix properties only when you want separate reports for a specific host or path.

Why does Page indexing say a page is "Crawled, currently not indexed"?

Google fetched the page and chose not to index it, usually because it judged the page thin, duplicate or low value. It is not an error to validate; improve or consolidate the page, link to it internally, and check again after the next crawl.

Is there anything I must add to appear in AI Mode?

No. Google states there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode". Keep the page indexable, keep structured data consistent with the visible text, keep Business Profile and Merchant Center current, and allow crawling in robots.txt and at the CDN.

Impinge Solutions runs Search Console reviews as part of its AI search visibility audit and its SEO service. If you want the monthly routine above set up for your site, request an estimate.

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