Google has updated its Search Console documentation, confirming it includes AI Mode data in Performance reports.
This is a change to note when reviewing your metrics, as it may impact traffic reporting patterns.
Understanding AI Mode and What’s Changed
AI Mode is Google’s interactive AI-powered search experience, which builds on AI Overviews to provide more detailed responses.
The feature breaks questions into smaller topics and searches for each one at the same time. This “query fan out” technique, as Google calls it, lets people explore topics more deeply.
The key change in Google’s documents is that AI Mode data counts toward the totals in Search Console.
Per the updated changelog:
“Data from AI Mode is now counting towards the totals in the Search Console Performance report.”
How AI Mode Metrics Work
The documentation explains how AI Mode measures different actions:
- Click: When someone clicks a link to an external page in AI Mode, it counts as a click in Search Console.
- Impression: Standard impression rules apply. This means users must see or potentially see a link to your site.
- Position: Position calculations in AI Mode work the same way as regular Google Search results pages. Carousel and image blocks within AI Mode use standard position rules for those elements.
When users ask follow-up questions within AI Mode, they start new queries. The documentation notes:
“All impression, position, and click data in the new response are counted as coming from this new user query.”
Google Says Best Practices Remain Unchanged
Google’s documentation says:
“The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search.”
There are no extra technical requirements beyond standard Google Search rules.
Google’s documentation clarifies:
“You don’t need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.”
Website owners can control the appearance of their content’s AI features using existing tools, such as nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex controls.
Looking Ahead
With AI Mode data now included in Search Console reports, you may notice changes in traffic patterns and metrics. The data appears within the “Web” search type in the Performance report, mixed with other search traffic.
The documentation notes that clicks from search results pages with AI features tend to be “higher quality.” Users are “more likely to spend more time on the site.”
However, without dedicated tabs for traffic from Google’s AI features, it’s impossible to verify those claims.
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
