Google Finally Gave You AI Search Data. Here's What to Do With It.

Something new in your Search Console.

If you've been following what AI Overviews are doing to local search traffic — and if you run a service business in a competitive market, you probably have — you've likely noticed a specific frustration: you could feel the shift, but you couldn't see it. Traditional analytics tell you how many people visited your website and from where. They don't tell you how many people saw an AI-generated summary that mentioned your competitors but not you, and left satisfied without clicking anything.

That changed on June 3, 2026. Google quietly launched a new section inside Google Search Console called the Generative AI Performance Report. For the first time, website owners can see how often their pages surface inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI-powered Discover results. The data goes back to May 18. And alongside the report, Google introduced something even more significant: a toggle that lets you opt your entire site out of appearing in AI search results at all.

Those two moves — visibility data and an opt-out option — arrived together, and the combination is raising real questions for local businesses. Understanding one without the other misses the point entirely. Here's how to think through both.

What the new report actually shows you.

At its core, the Generative AI Performance Report is organized around a single metric: impressions. Every time one of your pages appears inside an AI Overview, an AI Mode response, or an AI-curated Discover result, that counts as an impression. The report lets you slice that data by page, country, device type, and date — with granularity down to the hour if you want it. You can see whether it's mostly mobile users seeing you in AI results, which countries you're being surfaced in, and how impressions have trended over time.

What the report doesn't show matters just as much. There's no query-level data — you can see that your service page appeared in AI results 400 times last week, but you won't know what someone searched to trigger it. And there are no clicks. The report measures pure surface visibility: your pages appeared here, this many times, on these devices, in these countries. Whether any of those appearances drove someone to call your number or book an appointment is invisible.

For now, access is rolling out first to a subset of UK-based site owners, with global availability planned but no specific date announced. If your Search Console doesn't show the new section yet, that's the reason — not a sign that you're absent from AI results. The data exists; Google is just being cautious about the rollout.

The absence of click and query data has generated real frustration in the SEO community — and that frustration is fair. Impression data without context is interesting but hard to act on. That said, it's still the most important measurement signal Google has given local businesses in the AI search era, and even imperfect data is more useful than the nothing that existed before June 3.

The opt-out question, honestly answered.

Alongside the new reports, Google introduced a control generating the most debate: a toggle letting site owners block their content from appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and related generative AI features. Opting out doesn't touch your standard organic rankings — your traditional blue-link listings remain intact. It only removes you from the AI-generated response layer. For the initial rollout group, the setting takes effect June 17.

On the surface, the opt-out sounds appealing. If an AI Overview summarizes a topic using your content without sending you the visitor, you're providing information without receiving the reward. That logic holds for publishers whose business models depend directly on page views — news outlets, reference sites, recipe blogs. For them, being cited without a click is a bad deal.

But for local service businesses, the math looks different. A plumbing company, a dental practice, a nail salon, a law office — none of these get leads from page views. They get leads from calls, form submissions, and walk-ins. The path from "I saw this business in an AI result" to "I called them" is difficult to trace in analytics, but it's real. Brand familiarity built through AI-surface appearances influences decisions in ways that never appear as website sessions.

There's also the competitive dimension. If you opt out and the plumber down the street doesn't, their name and review score appear in AI results for every relevant local query in your area. You're still ranking in traditional results, but the first thing many users see is a generated summary that doesn't mention you. In competitive markets — South Florida ranks among the most competitive in the country for local service categories — ceding AI visibility has downstream effects that a strong organic ranking can't fully offset.

Why the data window matters more than the toggle.

The strongest argument for patience is simply the timeline. The AI visibility reports cover impressions going back only to May 18 — under three weeks of data as of this writing. Drawing firm conclusions from that window, then making a permanent site-level decision based on those conclusions, is working with far too little evidence. The businesses most likely to regret the opt-out are those that made it before a fuller picture emerged.

The missing query dimension compounds the problem. Knowing your homepage generated 600 AI impressions last week is interesting. Knowing that 400 of those came from searches like "emergency plumber Fort Lauderdale" or "orthodontist near me for adults" would be actionable. Google has acknowledged this gap. The SEO community broadly expects query-level visibility to be added in a future update — and when it arrives, the ROI picture for local service businesses will look fundamentally different than it does today.

What to do right now.

If you have access to the new report, open it and look at which pages are accumulating AI impressions. For most local service businesses, the pattern is predictable: your homepage and main service pages will show the most activity, since those are the pages AI is most likely to cite when summarizing who provides a service in a given area. But surprises happen — a blog post generating AI surface visibility despite low traditional traffic, or a location page being cited heavily for a city you hadn't prioritized. Those surprises are worth paying attention to.

Don't read too much into absolute numbers yet. What matters more is relative patterns. Pages generating substantial AI impressions alongside modest organic traffic are telling you something: the AI is finding enough structured, specific information on those pages to cite them confidently. Those pages deserve more investment — more local depth, more specific language about services and service area, more of the trust signals (real reviews, credentials, accurate business information) that help both AI and human visitors decide you're worth contacting.

If you don't have access yet — which describes most US-based business owners at the moment — the practical move is to stay opted in by default and focus on the fundamentals that make your website easier for AI to parse and cite accurately. Clear page structure with descriptive headings. Specific language about what you do, where you do it, and for whom. Consistent business information across your site, your Google Business Profile, and the major directories. Authoritative signals like genuine customer reviews, accurate service area content, and pages that answer the questions your customers are actually asking.

None of this is new advice. It's the same structural work that has always helped local businesses perform in search. What's changed is that Google is now measuring a distinct new dimension of that performance — and the businesses that have done the work are beginning to see it reflected in the AI visibility report. That's the actual significance of June 3: not that the rules changed again, but that for the first time, you can start to see whether you're winning or losing by them.