If you sell physical products, you have probably wondered whether Google's AI answers ever mention your shop. Until this summer you could only guess. Google announced a new Search Console report in June and, as of August 31, 2026, rolled it out to every website worldwide. It shows how often links to your site appeared inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, device and date.
It is free, it is already in your account if you have verified your shop in Search Console, and it takes about 15 minutes to read properly. Here is how, what to do with the answer, and where the report stops being useful.
What the report counts (and what it doesn't)
The report is called Generative AI performance for Search. Its one metric is impressions: Google defines them as how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. A few rules from Google's help page matter when you read the numbers:
- Two links, one impression. If two results from your site appear in the same AI answer, they count as a single impression.
- No clicks, no position. The report shows impressions only. It cannot tell you whether anyone visited, let alone bought.
- 1,000 rows. Tables are capped at 1,000 rows, the same limit as the main Performance report. A shop with thousands of products needs filters to see them all.
- Not every experiment. Search Labs experiments are excluded.
- Small sites may see nothing. If your site does not have enough impressions, the report will not show data.
- Recent days can change. Dotted lines in the chart mark preliminary data.
Google Discover has its own, separate generative AI report. This post covers Search.
Step 1: open the report
Sign in to Search Console, pick your shop's property and open the generative AI performance report directly. Set the date range to the last three months so a slow week does not hide a page.
If the report says there is not enough data, that is an answer too: Google is rarely linking to your site in AI answers yet. Skip to step 5 and check the setting, then come back in a month.
Step 2: list the product pages that appear
Open the Pages tab. Google groups rows by the final URL, so tracking parameters do not split one product into several rows.
To see only products, add a page filter with the part of the URL every product shares. On Shopify that is usually /products/; on WooCommerce it is often /product/. Export the table.
Step 3: compare with normal search for the same pages
A product with 300 AI impressions sounds good until you learn it had 30,000 in normal results. Google's help page says the generative AI report includes data from the Web search type of the main Performance report, so you can put the two side by side:
- Open Performance then Search results, keep the search type on Web, set the same date range and the same page filter.
- Export the Pages table.
- Put both exports in one spreadsheet: column A the URL, column B the AI impressions, column C the web impressions (look it up from the second export).
Then add a share column. If the AI export is on a sheet called ai and the web export on a sheet called web, both with URLs in column A and impressions in the last column:
B2: =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A2, ai!A:E, 5, FALSE), 0)
C2: =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A2, web!A:E, 5, FALSE), 0)
D2: =IF(C2=0, "", B2/C2)Adjust the column numbers to match your exports. Sort by column C, highest first. You now have your most-seen products in normal search and how often each also showed up in AI answers.
Step 4: find the products that never appear
The rows that matter most are the ones with plenty of web impressions and zero AI impressions. Those are products Google already shows people, but never links in an AI answer. Mark the top ten.
Also check the products that are missing from both exports. Search Console only lists pages that got impressions, so a bestseller that appears nowhere is a page Google barely shows at all. That is a normal search problem first; fix it there.
Two more cuts take a minute each:
- Countries. If you ship to three countries, check that AI impressions come from those three. Impressions from countries you do not ship to are curiosity, not sales.
- Search type. The report separates text searches from multimodal ones, where someone searches with an image. If you sell things people photograph and ask about, such as plants, parts or furniture, the image row tells you whether your product photos are doing any work.
Step 5: make sure you did not opt out by accident
Since August 31 Search Console also has a control for this. Go to Settings, then Search generative AI. There are three options:
- Include my site's links and content in Search generative AI features (the default)
- Exclude my site's links and content from Search generative AI features
- Inherit control from parent, which follows the setting of the parent property
If you or an agency picked Exclude, your pages will not be linked in AI Overviews or AI Mode and the report will stay empty. Google says changes generally take a few days to apply, and that the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search. It is also separate from Google-Extended, which limits use of your content for training Google's models rather than its appearance in answers. Choose to exclude only if you have decided to; do not leave it set by mistake.
What to do with the list
The report tells you where you appear, not why. Google does not publish a checklist for getting linked in AI answers, so be wary of anyone who sells one. What you can do is make sure the product pages on your top-ten list answer the questions a shopper asks, in plain text on the page:
- what it is made of, its size and weight;
- the price, delivery time and delivery cost to your main countries;
- the return window and who pays return shipping;
- what it is not suitable for.
Write the date of the change in your spreadsheet, then compare the same pages a month later. Because the report only counts impressions, check sales separately: if your analytics tool can show visits referred from AI assistants, put those next to the impressions so you know whether any of this turns into orders.
A 15-minute monthly routine
- Open the generative AI report, last three months, product filter.
- Export it and the matching Web export; refresh the spreadsheet.
- Look at the top ten products by web impressions: which ones gained or lost AI impressions?
- Check Settings, Search generative AI, is still on the option you chose.
It will not make Google link to you. It will tell you, every month, which products it already does, and which of your best pages it ignores.
