Key Takeaways
- Search Console now has a dedicated generative AI report, announced 3 June 2026 with data starting 18 May 2026 and a worldwide rollout completed 31 August 2026. It shows AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions — but not AI-specific clicks, CTR, queries or conversions.
- That gap is exactly what an AI Overviews checker has to fill: which prompts trigger an overview, whether you are cited in it, which competitors are, and which source earned the citation.
- GEOly observed 66,969 AI Overviews checks on commercial prompts between 1 Aug and 10 Oct 2026. 89.3% returned an AI Overview, each citing 8.63 sources on average.
- AI Overviews is a fan-out engine: it issues 7.89 grounding queries per answer (median 8) and never reuses the user's phrasing verbatim. Checking a single keyword tells you almost nothing.
- A usable check has four layers: trigger rate, citation presence, competitive share, and source attribution. Anything that reports only "AI Overview: yes/no" is a novelty.
Why you need a checker at all
For two years the honest answer to "am I in AI Overviews?" was "scrape the SERP and look". Google has now closed part of that gap itself.
On 3 June 2026 Google announced dedicated generative AI performance reports for Search and Discover. The Search report shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, the URLs that appeared, and breakdowns by country, device and date. Data begins 18 May 2026 with no historical backfill, and Google confirmed the rollout reached all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026.
Two caveats decide how much work is left for you.
First, it is a view, not a silo. The generative AI impressions were already flowing into your aggregate Performance totals; what is new is a segmented display of them.
Second, and more important, it measures visibility, not performance. The dedicated report gives impressions, pages, countries, devices and change over time. It does not separately give you AI clicks, CTR, queries or conversions. So it can tell you that something of yours was shown in an AI surface — not which prompt produced it, whether you were cited or merely crawled, who else was in the answer, or what it was worth.
Everything a checker adds lives in that second gap.
What "checking" AI Overviews actually requires
Layer 1 — Trigger rate
Does the query produce an AI Overview at all? This varies enormously by intent, and a single sample is noise: the same query can return an overview one hour and not the next.
GEOly's own observation data gives a sense of scale. Between 1 August and 10 October 2026 we ran 66,969 AI Overviews checks against commercial prompts;