On June 3, 2026, Google quietly shipped two features into Search Console in the same breath: a dedicated Generative AI performance report, and a toggle that lets a site owner opt their content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s AI features entirely. One measures your visibility inside Google’s AI answers. The other lets you switch that visibility off. Ship a dashboard and a kill-switch in the same release, and you’re not just adding a report — you’re admitting that AI Search is now a channel serious enough to need both.

For two years, the entire SEO industry has been navigating this channel blind: watching organic clicks soften, seeing AI Overviews eat the top of the SERP, and having no first-party number to point to. That changed this month. Here’s what actually shipped, what the industry is already speculating about, and what an e-commerce or content team should do about it — with everything graded so you know which parts are Google’s word and which parts are someone’s blog post.

What Actually Shipped (VERIFIED)

Two things launched together, and it’s worth keeping them separate in your head even though Google bundled the announcement.

1. The Generative AI performance report

Inside Search Console’s Performance section, a new “Generative AI” view now sits alongside the standard Search results report — with a second, separate version for Discover. It doesn’t introduce new data; Google has confirmed that AI-feature impressions were always folded into your overall Performance totals. What’s new is a dedicated lens on that slice.

As of writing, the report shows exactly one metric — impressions — broken out across four dimensions:

• Pages: which URLs on your site were shown inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, or Discover’s AI features
• Countries: where those impressions originated
• Devices: available for the Search version of the report
• Dates: with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity, all in Pacific Time

No clicks. No CTR. No average position. No query data. If you’re used to reading the standard Performance report as a four-metric grid, this one arrives with a quarter of the picture — impressions only, and Google has said additional metrics may come later based on feedback, without committing to a date.

A few mechanical details worth knowing before you trust the numbers: duplicate appearances of the same URL within a single search count as one impression, not two. The chart aggregates at the property level unless you filter to a specific URL. The newest data can appear as preliminary (shown with a dotted line) while it’s still being finalized. And historical data isn’t retroactive — it starts from mid-May 2026, so there’s no multi-year trendline to lean on yet.

Access is limited. Google is rolling the report out to a subset of website owners — reporting suggests the initial wave is concentrated among UK properties — before a wider global release on no confirmed timeline. If your property doesn’t show a Generative AI tab yet, that’s the staged rollout, not a misconfiguration on your end. The other reason you might not see data even with access: your site simply hasn’t accumulated enough AI-feature impressions to populate the report, or you’ve already excluded your site from these features (see below).

2. The Search generative AI control

Released the same week, a new setting under Settings > Search generative AI lets a site owner choose one of three states for their property:

• Include — your content can appear as links and can help ground AI answers in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s generative AI features. This is the default for every property.
• Exclude — your content is prevented from appearing in those features at all, and you won’t receive traffic or impressions from them.
• Inherit from parent — a child property (say, a subfolder or subdomain) simply follows whatever its closest parent property has set, unless you override it.

Two boundary claims matter more than the toggle itself. First, Google states this control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search — excluding your site from AI features doesn’t touch your position in classic organic results or the regular Discover feed. Second, this is a different lever from Google-Extended: Google-Extended governs whether your content trains Google’s AI models; the new control only governs whether your content can be surfaced live inside AI answers. If what you actually want is to be invisible to Google entirely, that’s still a job for noindex, not this toggle.

Timing matters here too. Site owners can review and configure this control now, but Google has stated it will only start honoring it in live Search from June 17, 2026 onward. Once you do flip it, expect roughly one to two days for exclusion to propagate, with some content taking longer due to caching. And the report and the control are connected in a practical way: use the Generative AI performance report to see what changing your control might cost you in visibility before you pull the lever.

VERIFIED Both features were officially announced by Google’s Search Central team on June 3, 2026, and are documented in Search Console Help. Rollout is explicitly described as a subset of properties, with UK sites reported as the initial wave.

Why Now? The Part Google Didn’t Put in the Headline (DISPUTED / CONTEXT)

Google’s own announcement frames this purely as a product improvement driven by site-owner feedback. Several independent SEO outlets covering the release have tied the timing — and specifically the UK-first rollout — to the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which reportedly obligates Google to give publishers a real measurement and opt-out mechanism for AI features, with meaningful penalties for non-compliance.

DISPUTED / VENDOR CLAIM The regulatory-pressure narrative is widely repeated across independent agency blogs but is not something Google’s own announcement confirms or denies. Treat the compliance angle as informed industry speculation, not an admitted fact, until Google or the CMA states it directly.

What is verifiable is the competitive backdrop: Microsoft shipped its own AI Performance reporting inside Bing Webmaster Tools in February 2026, roughly four months ahead of Google’s move. Whether Google was responding to regulators, to Microsoft, to publisher pressure, or all three, the practical effect is the same — AI-visibility reporting is becoming a baseline expectation across search platforms, not a Google-only feature.

What The Agencies Are Already Saying (Grade Each Claim Yourself)

Within days of the launch, agency blogs filled the gap left by the missing click data with their own interpretations. Some of this is useful pattern-reading; some of it is confident guessing dressed as insight. Here’s a sample, graded.

VENDOR CLAIM “If your traditional impressions are flat but AI impressions are rising, your content is being consumed by AI systems even as click-through traffic shifts. If traditional impressions are strong but AI impressions are low, you likely have a structured-data, entity-clarity, or content-extractability problem.” — This is a plausible diagnostic heuristic from agency commentary, not a framework Google has endorsed. Useful as a starting hypothesis; don’t treat it as confirmed causation without testing on your own pages.

VENDOR CLAIM “Opting out is a significant strategic risk for almost everyone, given AI Overviews’ and AI Mode’s massive reach.” — Directionally reasonable for most content-driven or e-commerce sites, but it’s a business judgment, not a Google statement. The right call still depends on your monetization model — publishers relying entirely on click-through ad revenue, or brands with real concerns about how their products are represented in AI summaries, may have a legitimately different answer.

VERIFIED Multiple independent sources and Google’s own documentation agree on the mechanical facts: impressions-only data, no clicks/CTR/query data yet, phased rollout starting with a limited set of properties, data starting mid-May 2026, and a stated (not guaranteed) intention to add more metrics over time.

What This Actually Means If You Run an E-Commerce or Content Site

Strip away the speculation and three practical actions remain, regardless of which vendor’s framing you trust.

• Check access, don’t assume absence means broken. If you don’t see a Generative AI tab under Performance yet, that’s the phased rollout — not a Search Console misconfiguration. Revisit every few weeks, especially if you have UK traffic or verified your property recently.
• Export a baseline before you touch anything. If you do have access, pull your current page-level AI impressions now. Data only goes back to mid-May 2026 — there’s no historical trend to fall back on, so today’s export is the earliest baseline you’ll ever have.
• Decide your control stance deliberately, before June 17. The default is Include, and for the overwhelming majority of commercial sites that’s the right default — you can’t collect AI-feature impressions or traffic if you’re excluded. But this is a real decision now, not a hypothetical one, and it’s worth a documented choice rather than an accidental default.

For teams already running a GEO or AEO program, this report is one more diagnostic input — not a replacement for the work of making content citable in the first place. Impressions without clicks tell you whether AI systems find you worth surfacing at all; they don’t tell you whether that visibility is converting. Pair this data with your existing GA4 event tracking and Share-of-Voice tracking rather than treating the new tab as a complete picture on its own.

What We Still Don’t Know

• Whether clicks, CTR, average position, or query-level data will be added, and when — Google has only said “over time,” with no timeline.
• Whether the opt-out control will ever offer per-surface granularity (excluding AI Overviews but keeping Discover’s AI features, for example), rather than one blanket toggle.
• Exactly how quickly and widely the global rollout will extend beyond the initial subset of properties.

The Bottom Line

Google now gives site owners a first-party, if incomplete, window into AI Search visibility — and a genuine lever to step out of it. Both are betas, both are impressions-only or blunt-instrument in their current form, and both are worth understanding now rather than waiting for the polished version. The report tells you whether you’re being seen. It doesn’t yet tell you whether being seen is paying off. That gap — impressions without outcomes — is exactly where a proper GEO/AEO diagnostic earns its keep.

Want your own AI Search Share-of-Voice read before you touch the new opt-out toggle?

Alneeko Technologies runs AI Search Share of Voice audits that pair Search Console’s new impression data with real GA4 and citation tracking — so you know whether your visibility inside AI Overviews is actually worth defending. Get in touch at alneeko.com.