Switch on Google’s AI mentions report. Don’t mistake it for the picture.

Google has switched on two new things inside Search Console for a slice of UK site owners: an AI mentions performance report and a toggle that lets you block your content from showing up in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The report is worth turning on the moment you have access. The block button is almost certainly not. Here is the honest read on both, and what I’d do this week.

The short version

If you don’t have time for the rest, the four things to take away:

• Switch the report on if it’s in your Search Console. It is the first first-party number any of us has had on AI Overviews. Capture a baseline.
• Don’t expect much from it. Impressions only. No clicks. No queries. Google only. Nothing on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Bing.
• Don’t hit the block button. For almost every commercial brand, switching off AI Overviews is a self-inflicted wound. We explain who the exception is below.
• Use it as one tile, not the picture. Pair it with a real cross-engine measurement programme. That is the bit Google will not do for you.

What Google has actually given you

On 3 June 2026 Google started rolling out a new Search Generative AI Performance report inside Google Search Console, the free tool every team with a website already uses to see how they turn up in normal search. For the first time, it pulls out a brand’s appearances inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover as their own line of data, broken down by:

• Impressions · how often URLs from your site appeared in Google’s generative AI features.
• Pages · which URLs were picked up.
• Countries · visibility on a country basis.
• Devices · the devices users were on when they saw you.
• Dates · hourly, daily, weekly and monthly granularity.

This is genuinely useful. It is the first first-party number any of us have had on Google’s AI Overviews specifically, and it costs nothing to turn on. If you are in the UK pilot, take the baseline today. Note it down somewhere. The data only becomes interesting once you have a couple of months of it next to a proper measurement programme. Google’s announcement and the help-centre doc walk through the detail.

What it doesn’t tell you

Now the limitations, because they are the whole story.

No clicks. Google has confirmed the report will not show click data. Asked directly, a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land they are “continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful”. That is a polite no. Treat it as one. The Bing equivalent went live months ago without clicks either, and the analyst consensus is that neither engine will ever release them.

No queries. You won’t see what was asked. Just that you were mentioned. So you can see the impression, but not the intent behind it. That makes it impossible to tell whether you turned up for the question you wanted to win.

Only Google. No ChatGPT. No Perplexity. No Claude. No Microsoft Copilot. Bing has its own report but it is a separate login and a separate tool. You need to look across the AI tools your buyers use to see whether you are being cited, or just being shown in the one engine that bothered to tell you.

UK subset only, for now. Google has rolled this out to a small set of UK site owners first, with a general rollout to follow at an unspecified later date. You may not see the report in your Search Console for a few months.

It is impressions, not citation share. Impressions tell you that your URL appeared somewhere in an AI feature. It does not tell you whether you were the primary citation, a passing mention, or something the AI named at all. Citation share is the metric that actually moves the needle. Impressions are a proxy for it at best.

The block button. Should you click it?

Google has also added a new toggle inside Search Console that lets a site block its content from appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover. Google has been clear that using it will not hurt your ranking in normal search. So technically, you can block AI Overviews without taking a Google hit elsewhere. The toggle exists because EU regulators pushed Google hard on giving publishers a real opt-out, and the CMA mandated something similar in the UK at the start of June.

Early signal: an industry survey suggested around one in three SEOs would use it. So a chunk of the market is going to try. Should you?

For almost every commercial brand, no. If you are a B2B software business, a professional services firm, a hotel group, a charity, a retailer, an agency, you want AI to recommend you. Blocking the toggle means Google will not include you in the answer. Your competitors will be in there. Your buyer will read about them instead of you. The behavioural shift to AI search means the AI answer is increasingly the first impression, and you are giving that up voluntarily.

The one group where it makes sense is publishers whose business model is paid traffic, subscriptions, or licensing. If your site funds itself on ad impressions or paywall conversions, AI Overviews are a real threat to your unit economics. A controlled block plus a commercial licensing deal is the play that NYT, the BBC and the Reddit/OpenAI tie-up are all aiming at. That logic does not transfer to a SaaS platform or a consultancy. For us, AI Overviews are a discovery channel, not a competitor.

If you are still tempted: be honest about what you are giving up. Once you opt out, you get no impressions and no traffic from Google’s AI surfaces at all. There is no “some” option. It is on or it is off.

What I’d do this week

1. Check whether the report is live in your Search Console. If it is, take a screenshot of the current state. Impressions, pages, countries, devices. That is your baseline.
2. Note your impression count by URL. Which of your pages is Google picking up? That tells you which of your content is “in the conversation”, even without clicks.
3. Leave the AI block toggle off. Unless you are a publisher with a licensing strategy, you want to be in the answer, not out of it.
4. Look beyond Google. Check the other AI tools your buyers use: who is cited, how often, which third-party sources drive it, and where you sit against competitors.
5. Re-check the report monthly. The interesting signal will be how the Google impression count moves alongside what you see elsewhere.

How this fits with measuring AI properly

Google’s report is one tile. A useful one. It tells you that you are turning up in Google’s AI surfaces, roughly how often, and on which pages. It does not tell you what was asked, whether anyone clicked, or what the other engines that buyers are using look like.

Citation share across the engines that count, on the questions that matter to your buyers, with the third-party sources driving each engine’s answers, is the picture. Google’s number sits inside that.

Turn the Google report on. Use it as a free signal. Then look at the rest, because the engines that decide whether your buyer chooses you are not all called Google.

Be Known. Be Cited.

Sources: Search Engine Land’s coverage of the rollout, 3 June 2026. Google’s product announcement. Google Search Central blog and the matching help centre doc. UK regulatory backdrop: CMA, 3 June 2026.