Google quietly flipped a switch this week that I've been half-waiting on since AI Overviews started showing up in my site's referrer logs as basically nothing. Starting September 24th, Search Console is rolling out separate reporting for AI Overviews and AI Mode, split out from the regular Search results report instead of being lumped into one undifferentiated pile of "impressions." I read about it Thursday morning, didn't think much of it, and then at around 11pm last night, unable to sleep for no good reason, I went and actually looked at my own numbers for techpad.in.
Here's what I found, and why I'm not sure it's good news exactly.
Over the trailing period Search Console showed me, this blog had 2,140 impressions attributed to AI Overviews and 9 clicks. Nine. For reference the regular Search results report for the same window showed around 31,000 impressions and 740-something clicks, which is already not a huge number for a site with fifteen years of posts sitting around, but at least it's a number with a plausible click-through rate attached to it. The AI Overview slice is a 0.4% CTR, and that's being generous because Search Console rounds in a way that makes small numbers look tidier than they are.
So what's actually happening is that Google's AI summaries are apparently reading my posts (or reading pages that cite my posts, it's genuinely hard to tell from the data) often enough to pull 2,000+ impressions, and almost nobody is clicking through. Which, fine, I sort of knew that already from the overall traffic numbers looking soft this year, but seeing it broken into its own bucket makes it land differently. It's one thing to suspect you're being summarized into irrelevance. It's another to get a dashboard that says so in a specific number.
A few things worth noting if you're going to go check your own site, because the UI is not exactly generous with context:
It's new enough that the sample is thin. I'm looking at a couple weeks of data, not months. I wouldn't draw a hard conclusion from this yet, mine included. I'm mostly just noting that the tool now exists and that the first look at it was underwhelming.
The query report doesn't map cleanly. You can filter by "Search type" the way you always could, but a lot of the actual queries tied to AI Overview impressions on my account show up as (not provided) or get folded into broader topic clusters rather than exact phrases. I assume this is deliberate, privacy reasoning or just technical limitation, but it makes it hard to go "oh THAT'S the post getting summarized" with any confidence.
Average position is basically meaningless here. For regular search, position tells you something real. For an AI Overview citation, I genuinely don't know what "position 4.2" is supposed to mean when there's no ranked list the user ever sees, and Google's own documentation on this is pretty thin so far. I spent a dumb amount of time last night trying to figure out if it correlated with anything and gave up around midnight.
I'll say the honest complaint part plainly, since there's no point being coy about it on my own blog: I think this report mostly exists so Google can say it gave publishers visibility, without that visibility changing anything about the actual incentive structure, which is still "get summarized, don't get visited." A transparency report isn't the same as a traffic source. It's nice to have the split instead of guessing, don't get me wrong, I'd rather have the data than not. I just don't think having it changes what I'd do differently tomorrow morning, which is keep writing the same way I have been since 2011 and not restructure fifteen years of posts around chasing a citation box that pays nine clicks for two thousand impressions.
If you run a Search Console property for anything with decent organic traffic, it's worth five minutes to go look at your own split once it shows up for you (it's rolling out gradually, so don't panic if you don't see the report yet, give it a few more days). Just don't expect the number to make you feel better. Mine didn't.