Your pages are showing up in Google’s AI Overviews. Search Console says impressions are up. Clicks are not. And nothing in Google Analytics or Search Console will tell you how many people the AI box actually sent. That is not a setting you missed. Google does not give anyone that number, and no plugin or tracker can work it out from the outside.
This article explains why, using 27,024 page views that arrived from Google on a news site we run, then shows how to track traffic from AI Overviews as far as Search Console allows, and the five numbers you can still get. It should save you a few hours chasing tricks that no longer work.
The short answer
You cannot track AI Overviews traffic as a separate number. A click from an AI Overview or from AI Mode arrives at your site looking exactly like a click from an ordinary Google result, and Google files it as ordinary search in both Google Analytics and Search Console.
Since 31 August 2026 Search Console shows how often your pages appeared in AI features, but it shows impressions only, with no clicks. What you can measure is the appearances, the total Google clicks they sit inside, and the visitors from assistants that do identify themselves, such as Gemini.
| Question | Can you get it? |
|---|---|
| How often my pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode | Yes, in Search Console |
| Which pages appear, on which devices, in which countries | Yes, in Search Console |
| How many clicks those appearances sent | No |
| Which searches triggered them | No |
| Which visitors in my analytics came from an AI Overview | No |
| Visitors sent by Gemini | Yes, they say where they came from |
| What appearing in AI features is worth in clicks | Roughly, by switching them off for a while |
Why a click from an AI Overview looks like any Google click
When someone clicks a link, their browser usually tells the destination where the click came from. That note is called the referrer. Think of it as the return address on an envelope. Most sites send the full address of the page the click came from. Google’s search pages send only the name of the sender, so the note says google.com and nothing else. Not which search, not which part of the page, not whether an AI Overview was involved.
We went through 30 days of raw server logs for a news site we run, 26 August to 24 September 2026, and pulled out every page load where the browser said it had come from Google. There were 27,024 of them. That is not the same thing as Search Console’s click count, which was 9,540 for the 28 days to 23 September. The log counts every load, including reloads and returns, from every Google surface including image search and the Google app, so we use it here only to show what the click carries, not how many clicks there were.
| What the click said about where it came from | Page views |
|---|---|
| Just google.com, nothing more | 26,336 |
| A Google redirect address that hides the search | 523 |
| The full search address, including the words typed | 88 |
| The Google app on Android | 52 |
| Something else | 25 |
Only 88 page views in a month carried the full search address, most from a few desktop browsers and a handful from Chrome on an iPhone, which sometimes passes the whole address along. Two of those 88 carried the marker Google uses for AI Mode, a piece of the address that reads udm=50. Both came from Chrome on an iPhone, on 2 September and 8 September, both landing on plain-language guides. So AI Mode clicks certainly reached the site. How many, we cannot say, because the other 26,936 carried no search address.
Here is one of the two, with the search words and the site’s own details removed. The last item on the third line is the AI Mode marker. The 26,336 page views in the first row of the table carried none of it.
GET /resources/a-guide-page/ 8 Sep 2026, Chrome on iPhone
Came from https://www.google.com/search?q=[query]&hl=en-GB
&sourceid=chrome-mobile&aioh=3&udm=50Two in 27,024 is not the share of your traffic that comes from AI Mode. It is the number of page loads that happened to leak the marker from one browser. The true share is unknowable from your side, which is the whole point.
Google is open about the consequence. Its channel definitions for Google Analytics say “Organic Search is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via non-ad links in organic-search results, including Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.” The AI Assistant channel it added in May 2026 covers ChatGPT, Gemini and the others, and the same page says it excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode. Our guide to tracking AI traffic in Google Analytics covers what that channel does catch.
How to track AI Overviews in Search Console
What Google does give you is a count of appearances. On 3 June 2026 Google announced generative AI performance reports in Search Console, first for a small group of sites, and a note on that post now says “As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide.” If you have not looked since August, it is there now.
How to open the report
- Open Search Console and pick your site.
- In the left menu, under Performance, click Search results.
- A sub-item called Generative AI appears underneath. Click it. The page is titled Generative AI features, with a Beta label.
- Choose a date range, then use the tabs under the chart for Pages, Countries, Devices and Days.
Google’s help page for the report defines the one number it shows. “Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.” The report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode together, leaves out Search Labs experiments, and Discover has a separate report of its own. If your site has very few AI appearances the report may not show at all.
What it shows on one site
For the news site, the 28 days to 23 September 2026 look like this.
| Search Console, 28 days | Figure |
|---|---|
| Generative AI report, impressions | 82,800 |
| Generative AI report, most-shown page | 2,233 |
| Ordinary report, impressions | 659,000 |
| Ordinary report, clicks | 9,540 |
| Ordinary report, clicks from AI features | Not shown |
So about one in eight of the site’s Google impressions came from AI Overviews or AI Mode. How many of the 9,540 clicks came from those appearances is the question the two reports cannot answer between them, because the clicks are counted once, in the ordinary report, with no label.
Over three months the same report shows 276,000 AI impressions. The pages appearing most often are evergreen guides, which fits what Ahrefs found in its own data. Its January 2026 guide compared 150,000 searches with an AI Overview against 150,000 without, found almost all of the first group were informational, and found the top result’s click rate had fallen by about a third after AI Overviews arrived on those searches.
What is missing
- Clicks. There is no clicks card, no click-through rate and no position. Google’s announcement says more metrics may come over time, without a date.
- Queries. The report shows pages, countries, devices and dates, not the searches that produced the appearances.
- A filter in the main report. We checked on 25 September 2026. The Search type menu offers Web, Text-based, Multimodal, Image, Video and News. The Search appearance filter offered only Translated results. Neither can pick out AI Overviews or AI Mode, so there is no way to see clicks for them.
- A clean position. Google’s page on how clicks and impressions are counted says a click on a link inside an AI Overview counts as a click, and that an AI Overview takes up a single position with every link inside it given that same position. So appearing in one can lift your average position while your click rate falls. That pattern is not a mystery. It is how the counting works.
Ways to track traffic from AI Overviews that do not work
Most guides on this topic offer one of four workarounds. Each falls short, and it is worth knowing why before you spend an afternoon on one.
The highlighted-text trick
For a while, links in AI Overviews opened your page with a piece of text highlighted, and the address carried a marker for that highlight. A script on the page could read the marker and pass it to Google Analytics. The catch was that featured snippets and People also ask boxes used the same marker, so it never proved an AI Overview, and the marker never reached your server or your logs, so only a script in the page could see it.
Then it went away. The guide that popularised the method was updated on 12 May 2026 to say Google had removed the marker from the links. Our logs for September show no sign of it.
Treating AI Mode as trackable
Some guides say AI Overviews cannot be separated but AI Mode can. Google’s own channel definition, quoted above, puts both in Organic Search, and the 30 days of logs bear it out. AI Mode lives at a search address with udm=50 on the end, and that marker survived on two clicks out of more than 27,000. None of the other 26,936 carried a search address. If you build a report on that marker you will be reporting a rounding error.
Adding tags to your links
Tags on the end of a link, such as utm_source, are how ChatGPT and Gemini visitors get recognised even when the referrer is missing. They only work because the assistant adds the tag. Google links to your page’s own address in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and you cannot add anything to it from your side.
Visibility trackers
Rank trackers and AI visibility tools run a list of searches and record whether your site appears in the AI answer. That is useful, and it is the only way to see which searches you appear for, since Search Console does not tell you. But it is a sample of searches someone chose, not a count of clicks. Google’s own guidance on AI features adds a plain warning about tools that claim to use internal Google metrics, because none has that access. Our piece on telling whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude is using your website goes into why a visibility score is a survey rather than a measurement.
Five things you can measure
- AI appearances and their share. Take the generative AI report’s impressions for a period and divide by the impressions in the ordinary report for the same period. On our news site it is about one in eight. Watch it monthly. It tells you how much of your Google presence is now inside AI answers, even though it says nothing about clicks.
- Total Google clicks, as the ceiling. Every AI Overview click is inside your ordinary Google click count. That count is the most any AI feature could have sent you. Then open the Pages tab in both reports and look at the click rate of pages that appear most in AI features. A page whose AI appearances rise while its click rate falls is showing you the effect, page by page, without a label.
- What the appearances are worth, by switching them off. This is the only real click measurement available, and it is a blunt one. See below.
- Visitors sent by Gemini. Gemini is Google’s assistant, but its clicks carry a gemini.google.com referrer and often a utm_source=gemini tag, so they can be counted. Over a similar 30 days the news site’s Pro report recorded 57 people sent by Gemini to 39 pages. The table below sets that against the raw log.
- Google’s bots on your pages. AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini answer from the search index that Googlebot builds, so no bot fetches your page at the moment someone asks. What you can see is GoogleOther, which Google’s crawler documentation describes as a general crawler its product teams use to fetch public content. Google also runs fetchers that act for a person, and the one we saw was the fetcher behind NotebookLM, which collected 96 different pages in the month.
| Google on the news site, 30 days | Plugin | Raw log |
|---|---|---|
| People sent by Gemini | 57 | 116 |
| Pages fetched by GoogleOther | 103 | 785 |
| Clicks from AI Overviews or AI Mode | Not counted | Not knowable |
The two gaps are expected. The plugin counts people rather than page loads, leaves out anyone logged in to the site, and drops requests from known automated addresses. Above all, the site’s cache answers most requests before WordPress runs, so the plugin never sees them. Our guide to caches hiding bot visits explains that and how the log import closes it.
The switch-off test
Since June 2026, and for every site since 31 August, Search Console has had a setting called Search generative AI control, under Settings. It has three options, Include, Exclude and Inherit, and every top-level site starts on Include. Google’s help page says that if you choose Exclude, “You won’t receive any traffic or impressions from these features.” Your pages stay in ordinary results, the setting is not used as a ranking signal, and it does not affect AI training, which is a separate control called Google-Extended. It also removes you from the AI features in Discover.
That makes it a measuring instrument. If AI features are sending you clicks, switching them off should lower your Google clicks. If they are mostly answering the question so nobody clicks, it should not.
- Record four weeks of Google clicks per page from the ordinary Performance report, and four weeks of AI impressions from the generative AI report.
- Set the control to Exclude. Google says it generally takes a few days to apply, usually one or two, and some content can take longer.
- Wait until the generative AI report falls to near zero. That is your confirmation the exclusion took.
- Compare four weeks of clicks per page against the four weeks before, dropping the changeover days at each end.
- Set it back to Include.
Treat the result as a rough answer, not proof.
- You give up whatever clicks the AI box was sending for the whole test.
- What you measure is the difference between being inside the AI box and sitting below it in the ordinary results, since the box still appears with other sites in it.
- Traffic moves for many other reasons in four weeks. On a news site the news cycle swamps everything, so compare the click-through rate in the Performance report rather than raw clicks, and repeat the test if you can.
- Search Console data itself runs two to three days behind.
For scale, the Pew Research Center tracked about 69,000 Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025 and found people clicked a result in 8 percent of searches that showed an AI summary, against 15 percent without one, and clicked a link inside the summary itself in 1 percent. Google’s own June 2026 announcement of the controls says it has been adding inline links and previews to drive more clicks. The switch-off test is how you find out which of those describes your site.
What our plugin counts, and the one gap no tool can close
Forge AI Bot Log counts what can be counted honestly. The free plugin records every AI bot that reaches WordPress, including GoogleOther and Googlebot, labelled by the job it is doing, with a log import for sites behind a cache. The Pro add-on counts the people sent by assistants that identify themselves, which includes Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot, and pairs each visit with what that company’s bots did on the page beforehand.
It does not count clicks from AI Overviews or AI Mode, and this is a design choice rather than a limitation we are working around. The Pro help text says it plainly. Clicks from Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode look exactly like ordinary Google Search clicks, so they are left out rather than guessed. Any tool that shows you an AI Overviews traffic number is either counting something else, such as appearances, or estimating. We would rather show a gap than a guess.
Common questions
Can Google Analytics show AI Overviews traffic?
No. Google’s channel definitions place AI Overviews and AI Mode clicks in Organic Search, and the click carries nothing that would let you separate them. The AI Assistant channel added in May 2026 covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and others, and Google says it excludes AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Where is the AI Overviews report in Search Console?
Under Performance, click Search results, then Generative AI. It shows impressions by page, country, device and date for AI Overviews and AI Mode together. Discover has its own version.
Can you track AI Mode traffic separately?
Not reliably. AI Mode clicks carry the same bare google.com referrer as everything else. In 30 days on our site, 2 clicks out of 27,024 leaked the AI Mode marker, both from one phone browser. That is evidence AI Mode sends people, not a way to count them.
Will Google add clicks to the report?
Google’s June 2026 announcement said it would consider adding metrics over time, and by the worldwide rollout on 31 August 2026 the report still showed impressions only. Nothing has been promised or dated.
Should I opt out of AI Overviews?
Not as a first move. Opting out removes you from a place where, on our site, one in eight Google impressions now happens, and it does not stop AI training, which is a separate control. Run the switch-off test above for a few weeks first. If your clicks do not fall, you have learned that the appearances were not sending people anyway, and you can decide with a number instead of a feeling. Our article on whether to block AI bots covers the wider question.
What to do this week
- Open Search Console, then Performance, Search results, Generative AI, and note your AI impressions for the last 28 days beside your total impressions and clicks.
- Stop looking for AI Overviews in Google Analytics. It is inside Organic Search and will stay there.
- Count the visitors that do identify themselves, from Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest, with the AI Assistant channel or a count on your own site.
- If the question of what AI Overviews are worth matters to your business, plan the switch-off test and pick a quiet month.
To track AI Overviews traffic honestly, track the appearances, treat total Google clicks as the ceiling, and measure the rest by experiment. The clicks themselves stay hidden, on every site, in every tool. Our piece on which prompts sent AI to your site looks at the other question people ask about AI visitors, and gets a similar mix of answers.
Count the AI traffic you can see
The free plugin records every AI bot visit on your WordPress site, including Google’s, labelled by job and checked against each company’s published addresses. Pro adds the people sent by Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot, recognised from the referrer or the tag, and pairs each one with the bot read that came before it.