What does Search Console's Generative AI report show?
Google says its Generative AI performance report had reached all websites worldwide by 31 August 2026. The Search version counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google defines an impression as each time a link to your site was shown to a user in a generative AI feature. You can group the data by page, country, device or date, and filter by text-based or multimodal search. There is no query dimension, and the report shows impressions only, with no clicks or average position. Discover has its own report, and Search Labs experiments are excluded.
Google says traffic from AI features is counted in the main Performance report under the Web search type, together with other Search traffic. Dates in the Generative AI report are in Pacific Time, and the usual 1,000-row table limit applies.
What does Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report show?
Microsoft's AI Performance dashboard in Bing Webmaster Tools reports how often your content is cited in AI-generated answers. According to Microsoft, it shows total citations, average cited pages, page-level citation activity and trends over time. It also lists grounding queries, which Microsoft describes as the key phrases the AI used to retrieve content that was cited. A March 2026 update links the two views, so you can select a grounding query to see the pages cited for it, or select a page to see its grounding queries. Microsoft notes that one grounding query can map to several pages.
Grounding queries are the closest any free tool comes to showing the questions behind AI citations. Use them to check whether the cited page answers that query fully and accurately.
How does GA4 label visits from AI assistants?
Google Analytics 4 now has an AI Assistant channel in its default channel group. Google's definition covers visits from sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot or Grok. Visits from Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode are excluded from it and counted as Organic Search. GA4 sets the medium to ai-assistant when the referrer matches its list of AI assistants. The channel appears in the acquisition reports when you view them by Session default channel group. Default channel groups cannot be edited, but you can create a custom channel group if a source you care about is not on Google's list.
Visits that arrive without referrer information cannot be attributed to an assistant, so treat AI Assistant counts as a minimum.
Why do the three numbers not match?
The reports count different events in different products. Search Console counts impressions: a link to your page was shown in a Google AI feature, whether or not anyone clicked. Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations in the AI-generated answers Microsoft reports on. GA4 counts sessions: someone arrived on your site. A click from a Google AI Overview lands in GA4 as Organic Search, so it does not appear in the AI Assistant row. Time zones differ too, since Search Console dates are in Pacific Time while GA4 uses the time zone set on your property. Compare trends within each tool and avoid adding the figures together.
What can none of these tools tell you?
None of the free reports records the wording of an answer, whether your business was named or described accurately, or which competitors were named alongside you. Search Console's AI report has no query data, so you cannot see which questions produced an impression. For assistants that offer site owners no reporting console, GA4 visits are the only free signal. Paid tools that run prompts on a schedule and save the answers cover some of this gap. Google's guidance says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems, so treat their output as sampled observations.
What does a monthly routine look like for a small business?
A short monthly routine is enough for most small sites. Use one spreadsheet so each month can be compared with the last, and keep the same date range in every tool. Small numbers move a lot from month to month, so look for a direction over several months before acting on a single change. Record website edits, outages and advertising campaigns in the same sheet, because they explain many movements that look like AI effects.
- Export the Search Console Generative AI report by page and note which pages gained or lost impressions.
- In Bing Webmaster Tools, list the grounding queries for your most-cited pages and check each page answers them.
- In GA4, record AI Assistant sessions and the enquiries they produced, alongside Organic Search.
- Run your fixed set of buyer questions in the assistants you care about and save the answers.