Google now shows AI performance globally and calls it SEO

Why this is news now

In late August, the AI reports in Search Console rolled out globally, together with a toggle that controls whether your content may appear in AI answers. That means two things: the work builds on the same SEO principles as regular search, and you can now see what visibility and traffic you get from AI answers – and choose whether you want to appear there at all.

What does Google's AI guide say?

Google's AI guide, published in May 2026, gave the industry a long-awaited answer on where the company stands on AEO and GEO. In the guide, Google states that optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode means optimizing for the search experience, i.e. the same type of optimization done for traditional search engines. Google treats AEO and GEO as extensions of regular search engine optimization, in other words, part of the same work.

Much of the guide will be familiar to anyone already working with SEO. It's about creating unique content with original insights and delivering it credibly. Pages need to be indexable and able to appear as excerpts. The technical pieces also need to be in place, such as code describing the content (semantic HTML), reasonable load times, and not repeating the same text in multiple places.

Google also debunks several common myths about visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode, including the heavily discussed llms.txt file:

• The llms.txt file, meant to point out your most important pages for AI, is not needed to appear in Google's AI answers.
• The page does not need extra code aimed specifically at AI (AI markup) to appear in AI answers.
• Splitting text into small standalone chunks is unnecessary, since the systems understand pages that cover multiple topics.
• Fabricated mentions of your brand on other sites give you nothing.

New reports in Search Console roll out globally

The AI performance report in Search Console has existed since early summer, but on August 31, 2026 it became available to all users worldwide. It shows impressions when a link to your page appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and can be broken down by page, country, device and date. Clicks, click-through rate and search queries are missing from the view, however. An impression does not mean a visit; ten thousand AI impressions are not ten thousand visitors.

With the new toggle in Search Console, you can keep pages out of AI Overviews and AI Mode in Discover. That can be relevant if you want more control over how your content is used and displayed in AI-generated answers, for example if it concerns sensitive, exclusive or business-critical content. Opting out removes impressions and traffic from there, while your ranking in regular search results stays unchanged.

What has actually changed in the search results

So Google describes AI optimization as SEO, but the search surface itself actually looks very different today. AI Overviews, Google's short AI summary, appears in more than one in five searches, and once the box is shown, click-through drops by nearly 60 percent, according to the analytics firm SparkToro. The same measurement shows that almost seven out of ten US Google searches in early 2026 led to no clicks at all.

A strong organic ranking, however, no longer goes as far toward being cited in the AI answer. Ahrefs, which builds search analytics tools, measured in March 2026 that only 38 percent of pages cited in AI Overviews also ranked on Google's first page, down from 76 percent in July 2025. AI answers increasingly draw from pages outside the top results. A top ranking is therefore not a direct route into the AI answer; what matters is whether the page is judged worth citing.

Strengthen the fundamentals and start measuring right

So it still pays off to invest in traditional search engine optimization. But for those leading marketing efforts, there are now entirely new ways to see what works in AI answers – and what doesn't. Here's how you can act on it:

• Keep publishing indexable pages and content with unique insights.
• Track the AI report in Search Console at the segment and trend level, since an impression says nothing about what the visitor does afterward.
• Use the Search Console toggle thoughtfully, so you don't accidentally shut your pages out of AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The fact that visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode still relies on traditional search engine optimization takes some of the drama out of the talk around AI visibility. There is no secret shortcut to appearing in AI answers, but competition has gotten tougher.

AI search cites fewer pages and generates fewer clicks, which makes the quality of your SEO even more important than before. The question, then, is not which AI trick you're missing, but whether your SEO is good enough for the new search experience.

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