Google AI Mode traffic data comes to Search Console

/dans

Google’s AI Mode counts toward the totals you see in your Search Console Performance report, starting today.

Also, Google updated its Search Console help document (What are impressions, position, and clicks?) with a new section to clarify how clicks, impressions, and positions are counted in AI Mode.

AI mode methodology: Based on the new AI Mode section of Google’s help doc, here’s how metrics will be reported:

  • Click: A click on any external link in AI Mode counts as a click in Search Console.
  • Impression: If your page appears in Google’s AI response, it counts as an impression.
  • Position: Calculated just like standard search results.
    • AI Mode doesn’t appear as one position like AI Overviews. Each component inside AI Mode (e.g., a link card, image block, or carousel) has its own position, depending on whether it qualifies under Google’s standard search element rules.

Follow-up questions. Whenever users ask a follow-up question in AI Mode, Google treats that as a new search. All clicks, impressions, and positions are attributed to the new query.

Why we care. There has been a lot of confusion about how AI Mode reporting in Google Search Console. However, just like with AI Overviews reporting, Google won’t let us filter to see just AI Mode impressions, clicks, and CTR.

The new section. You can read it here in full. This is what Google added:

AI Mode expands on AI Overviews to show a more interactive AI-powered response with links to web resources that support the information or direct the user to view relevant webpages. AI Mode groups the user’s question into subtopics and searches for each one simultaneously, and users can go deeper.

  • Click: Clicking a link to an external page in AI Mode counts as a click. 
  • Impression: Standard impression rules apply. 
  • Position: Position in AI Mode follows the same methodology as a Google Search results page. Generally, carousel and image blocks within AI Mode are calculated using the standard position rules for those elements.

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.