There is a new report sitting inside Search Console this morning, and Google has put a pop-up on the front page so you cannot miss it. It shows how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It does not show how many people clicked. Not one click, anywhere in the report.
That gap runs through the whole day. Bing is testing a link that sends the click back to Bing. ChatGPT sells ads beside answers that rarely mention the advertiser.
SEO and search
Search Console opens its AI report to everyone
Google launched the generative AI performance report quietly in June and gave it to a slice of accounts. On 11 August it appeared globally, and Google added a prompt on the Search Console home screen reading “Get more detail on your site’s performance in the generative AI features on Google Search” with an Open report button beside it. That pop-up is the real news. Google wants people using this report.
The report separates the impressions your pages earned inside AI Overviews and AI Mode from the rest of your search performance, and breaks them down by page, country, device and date. There is a matching view for Discover. The data begins on 18 May 2026, so nothing before that exists and nothing will fill it in later.
What the report leaves out is clicks and queries. You can see that a page showed up. You cannot see what someone asked, or whether they came through.
Why this matters for your business: impressions still tell you something useful, which is whether Google trusts a page enough to quote it. Open the report today, write down your impressions for the last 28 days, and put a monthly reminder in your diary to check it again. Then look at which pages Google picked. In our experience it favours pages that answer one question plainly near the top, with a clear heading and a direct sentence underneath. If your best commercial page is missing from that list, that is your rewrite brief.
Bing is testing a link that keeps your click
Sachin Patel spotted Bing testing underlined, clickable words inside the description text of ordinary organic results on 10 August. Click one and you do not land on the website. You land on a fresh Bing search for that phrase. The words come from your page and the click goes back to Bing.
Why this matters for your business: there is nothing to optimise here yet, because Bing has not said how the phrases get chosen. What it does change is the value of a ranking. A first place result that gives readers three new ways to stay inside the search engine is worth less than it was. Split Bing out as its own channel in GA4 rather than lumping it under organic, so you can see if referrals thin out over the next few months. Bing carries small volume in South Africa, but it feeds Copilot, and that is worth watching.
Paid and analytics
Google Ads and Analytics will now read the reports for you
Google announced on 10 August that its Ask Advisor assistant is getting agentic features across Google Ads and Analytics. Analytics gets a homepage summary of what changed since you last logged in, delivered by email or mobile notification if you want it. Google Ads gets a rebuilt homepage with insight cards you can question in plain language. Both get Dashboards, where you type a request and Google builds the chart plus a written explanation.
Why this matters for your business: if nobody at your company enjoys opening Analytics, this removes the worst part of the job. Use it. Just remember the summary is an interpretation, not a fact, and it will happily explain a drop that was actually a broken tag or a public holiday. Pick one claim it makes each month and check the underlying numbers yourself before you change a budget on the strength of it.
Content
ChatGPT is running ads on a quarter of buying questions
SE Ranking analysed more than 50,000 commercial prompts across 20 industries and published the results on 10 August. Sponsored placements appeared on 25.94 percent of them, which puts ChatGPT within touching distance of Google’s AI Mode at 29.45 percent. Every ad sat below the answer, alone, with no competitor beside it.
Two numbers stand out. Around 14.35 percent of the ads had nothing to do with the prompt, roughly one in seven, including a clothing retailer advertised against a question about dating apps. And only 3.63 percent of advertisers were cited as a source in the answer printed directly above their own ad. The exact advertised page turned up in citations 0.09 percent of the time.
Why this matters for your business: buying the ad does not buy you into the answer. These are two separate jobs and they need two separate budgets. If you are testing ChatGPT Ads, write your context hints tightly, because loose ones are what put a clothing brand next to a dating question, and you cannot see the conversations that triggered your spend. The work that gets you quoted in the answer is the same as always, publishing clear, specific pages a machine can lift a sentence from.
Automotive
Merchant Center changes how it counts your stock on 24 August
From 24 August Google is changing how Merchant Center performance reports are calculated. The stated aim is consistency, bringing Merchant Center metric definitions into line with how the same words are used in Google Ads and YouTube, and splitting YouTube affiliate results out from everything else. There is no opt out and no action required, which is precisely why it catches people.
Separately, Google spent 10 August investigating a Merchant Center outage. Nothing was lost, but it is a reminder that everything downstream of your feed depends on one platform being awake.
Why this matters for your dealership: vehicle ads run on Merchant Center feeds, so this is your reporting, not somebody else’s. Your impressions and clicks will step up or down on 24 August for definitional reasons and none of it will mean a single extra buyer walked onto the floor. Export your Merchant Center performance data for 1 to 23 August before the change lands, and keep it. Then add a note to whatever report goes to the dealer principal marking 24 August as a measurement change, because the first month-on-month comparison after this will be wrong and somebody will act on it. While you are in there, check your feed processed cleanly after Monday’s outage and that sold stock has actually dropped out.
What to do this week
- Open the generative AI report in Search Console and record your baseline impressions.
- Split Bing out as its own channel in GA4 so you can watch its referrals separately.
- Export Merchant Center performance data for early August before the 24 August reporting change.
- WordPress 7.1 releases on 19 August, so test the release candidate on a staging copy now.
Not sure which of your pages Google is quoting in AI answers? Get in touch and we will go through the report with you.
Sources
- Google’s Generative AI report in Search Console now launched globally, Search Engine Watch
- Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports, Google Search Central
- Bing tests clickable underlined text in organic result descriptions, Search Engine Watch
- Google brings new AI agent capabilities to Ads and Analytics, Search Engine Land
- Study: ChatGPT ads appear on 26% of commercial prompts, Search Engine Land
- ChatGPT ads study, SE Ranking
- Merchant Center announcements change log, Google Merchant Center Help
- Google investigates Merchant Center outage, Search Engine Land