How to track AI Mode traffic in Search Console
You can see how often AI Mode showed your pages, but only added together with AI Overviews, and only as impressions. Clicks from AI Mode are counted, inside the normal Performance report, where nothing separates them from ordinary results.
That main report is the record the ShownTrue Search Console import is built to keep. This page covers where AI Mode sits in it, the newer report that counts AI impressions on their own, and the questions neither of them answers.
Where AI Mode shows up in Search Console
In two places. The first is the Performance report you already use. When Google launched a separate view of AI features in June 2026, it said the main report keeps counting them:
This data is included in the overall performance report, where it will continue to be tracked to give site owners an overview of the overall visibility of their site in Google Search.
The second is that separate view, the Generative AI performance report. A note Google added to the announcement says every site has had it since 31 August 2026. It covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it reports one metric:
Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.
The two overlap. In the help page’s words, “The generative AI performance report includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report (Search results).” An AI impression in the new report is also an impression in the old one, so adding them together counts it twice.
How Google counts a click in AI Mode
The rules are on the help page that defines every Performance metric. A click is a click: “Clicking a link to an external page in AI Mode counts as a click.” Impressions follow the standard rules, and position is measured as on a normal results page.
The rule that changes how you read the queries is the one about follow-ups:
If a user asks a follow-up question within AI Mode, they are essentially performing a new query. All impression, position, and click data in the new response are counted as coming from this new user query.
So the Queries tab can hold long, conversational questions that nobody typed into a normal search box. They are follow-ups, each counted as its own query. AI Overviews work differently: “An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position.” Every link inside one overview shares the overview’s position, whatever order it appears in.
What the AI report leaves out
The help page offers four ways to break the report down: Pages, Countries, Dates, Devices. That list is what you cannot do as much as what you can:
- No queries. You can see which pages appeared in AI answers, but the report does not say which searches put them there.
- No clicks. The report counts how often a link was shown. Whether anybody followed it is only in the main report, mixed with every other result.
- No split between AI Mode and AI Overviews. Both are listed as covered, and the help page describes no dimension or filter that separates them.
- The usual limits. “Note that the usual data limitations (1,000 row limitation, time period, etc) for the Search performance report also apply to this report”, so a large site sees its top pages and not the long tail.
Analytics will not fill the gap on its own, because it sees a visit after the click and Search Console sees the result before it. Search Console vs Analytics explains why the two never agree.
How to track AI Mode traffic, step by step
With those limits, tracking means putting the AI impressions for a page next to that page’s total clicks, and watching both over time.
1Open the Generative AI performance report
In Search Console, go to Performance reports and choose Generative AI performance report (Search). If it is missing, the help page gives two reasons: your site has not had enough impressions in AI features yet, or the site has been excluded from Search generative AI features.
2Read it by page
Switch to the Pages tab and set the same date range you use elsewhere. This is the list of your pages that AI Overviews and AI Mode linked to, with how often. Export it, because the table stops at 1,000 rows like the main report.
3Put clicks beside it from the main report
Open the Performance report on the Web search type, filter to one of those pages and the same dates, and read its clicks. Those clicks include any from AI Mode and AI Overviews, mixed with ordinary results. You get the page's total, never the AI share of it.
4Watch the two lines move together
A page whose AI impressions rise while its total clicks fall is the case worth reading closely. Search the queries it ranks for yourself and see what the AI answer says and whether your link is in it. That reading is a judgement; the report will not make it for you.
When AI impressions climb and clicks do not follow, the page is being shown without being chosen, which is the same pattern as high impressions and low clicks on an ordinary result, and the same checks apply.
Keeping the history
Search Console keeps a limited window of data, so a comparison you want to make next year needs exporting this year. ShownTrue’s Search Console import is built to keep the main Performance report by day, which includes the AI Mode clicks described above.
Its honest state: the import is written and has never run against a real Google account, so it has kept nothing for anybody yet. It does not read the Generative AI report. The capability page says exactly what is built.