In short
Search Console now reports on how your site appears in AI features and in multimodal search - the searches that start from an image or voice rather than typed text. For the first time this gives you first-party numbers on a channel most businesses have only been guessing about. The data is real but partial, and the most common mistake is reading a small number as "this channel doesn't matter".
What the report gives you
Impressions and clicks for queries where your site appeared within AI features, alongside the conventional search data you already had. Because it comes from your own property, it is not an estimate from a third-party tool - it is what Google recorded.
That matters because until now the honest answer to "how much traffic do we get from AI search" was that nobody could tell you. Analytics largely folds AI-assistant referrals into direct traffic, and third-party visibility tools infer rather than measure.
What it still doesn't tell you
- It is Google's surfaces only. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are not in this report and will not be.
- Appearing is not the same as being cited prominently. An impression inside an AI feature covers a range of very different placements.
- Query data stays limited. The usual privacy thresholds apply, so long-tail queries are suppressed.
How to read it without the wrong conclusion
Most sites looking at this report for the first time see a small number and conclude the channel is irrelevant. Two reasons to be careful with that.
First, the base is small because the surface is new, not because the intent is low. The searches that trigger AI answers skew toward the question-shaped, high-consideration queries that convert well.
Second, a lot of AI-influenced behaviour never shows up as a click at all. Someone who asks an assistant for a recommendation, gets your name, and then searches for your brand directly appears in your data as brand traffic. The assistant did the work; your report credits the brand search.
The practical use is comparative rather than absolute: watch the trend across months, and watch which pages appear. The pages that surface in AI features tend to share a shape - a direct answer near the top, specific facts in text, a clear source. That tells you what to do more of.
Sources
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