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Google Search Console's New AI Report: What Dentists Get

PJ

Pete Johnson

9 min read

Google has spent the last two years telling dental practices that AI Overviews matter, then handing them zero data to prove it. That changed this week.

On June 3, 2026, Google launched Search generative AI performance reports in Search Console, a new set of reports that finally show how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Google Discover.

That's the good news.

The bad news: there are no clicks, no CTR, no average position, and no queries. You get impressions and pages, sliced by date, country, and device. That's it.

This is still a meaningful shift. For the first time, you can measure whether the schema, FAQs, and content rewrites your agency has been billing you for are actually getting your practice cited in AI search. Here's the plain-English version of what shipped and what to do with it.

What's Actually in the New Reports

Google added two new report views inside the Search Console Performance section.

Report #1: Generative AI performance on Search: covers impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode on Google Search.

Report #2: Generative AI performance on Discover: covers AI-generated summaries inside Google Discover (the personalized feed in the Google app and on mobile homepages).

Both reports show:

  • Impressions: how many times URLs from your site appeared in AI features
  • Pages: which URLs got pulled
  • Dates: daily breakdown
  • Countries: geographic distribution
  • Devices: desktop, mobile, tablet

That last one matters more than it sounds. AI Overviews show up at different rates on mobile vs. desktop, and most of your patients are searching from a phone.

What you can NOT see (yet):

  • Clicks or CTR: Google still hasn't given us click data from inside AI features
  • Average position: there's no "position 1" in an AI summary
  • Queries: you cannot see which keywords triggered the AI citation
  • AI Overviews vs. AI Mode split: both are bucketed together
  • Filters and comparisons: none of the slicing the standard Performance report gives you

The table is also capped at 1,000 rows and aggregated on Pacific Time, same constraints as the regular Performance report.

Why This Matters for Dental Practices

I've been writing about this gap for over a year. AI Overviews appear on roughly 48% of all tracked queries and 88% of healthcare queries, yet there was no way to know if your practice was one of the sites being cited.

You'd run a search for "sedation dentistry cost" in your city, see whatever generic answer Google generated, and have no idea whether your page was one of the three sources cited at the top. Or whether you were nowhere in the consideration set.

This report closes that loop. You can finally answer:

  • Are we showing up in AI Overviews for our money keywords?
  • Which of our service pages is Google's AI actually pulling from?
  • Are we losing AI visibility week over week?

You still can't see which queries trigger your citations. That's the most painful missing piece. But you can now see impressions over time and which pages are doing the work.

For a dental practice, that's the difference between "we don't know" and "we have a baseline."

How to Tell If You Have Access

Google is rolling these reports out in stages. Right now, only a subset of websites can see them. The early rollout is concentrated in select markets (the UK was first).

To check:

  1. Open Google Search Console
  2. Go to Performance
  3. Look for a new section labeled Search generative AI in the report navigation

If you don't see it, you're in the waitlist queue. Google has said they'll expand access "over the coming months" based on feedback from the first wave.

In the meantime, the standard Performance report still rolls AI clicks and impressions into the overall Search totals. So if your AI traffic exists, it's hiding in your regular numbers, just not labeled.

What to Do the Day You Get Access

Three things, in this order.

1. Set Your Baseline Before You Touch Anything

The single biggest mistake practices make with new analytics tools: they look at the data once, change ten things, and have no idea what worked.

The day this report turns on for your site, export the last 16 months of impression data (the maximum window GSC offers). Save it. That's your baseline. Every test you run from here gets measured against it.

2. Find Your AI-Cited Pages

Sort the Pages tab by impressions, descending. The top of that list is the content Google's AI is actually pulling from your site. Three patterns to look for:

  • Service pages with FAQ schema: usually the top cited
  • Cost-related pages: "how much does Invisalign cost in [city]" is the kind of query AI Overviews loves
  • Procedure detail pages: the boring "what to expect during a root canal" content gets cited heavily

If your top AI-cited pages are different from your top organic-cited pages, that's a signal. The content that ranks for AI search isn't always the same content that ranks for traditional blue links.

3. Compare to Total Search Impressions

Pull the same date range from your standard Performance report. The ratio of AI impressions to total Search impressions tells you how big the AI footprint is for your practice.

For most dental sites, expect that number to fall somewhere between 10% and 30% of total impressions, heavily skewed toward informational and pricing queries, not local "dentist near me" searches. Local intent is still mostly protected. Every cost, procedure, and "is X safe" query is fair game.

What This Doesn't Tell You (and How to Fill the Gap)

The missing query data is the biggest hole, and it's not going away soon. Google has historically been protective of query-level data inside AI features, partly for privacy reasons and partly because queries inside AI Mode are conversational, not keyword-shaped.

To fill the gap, you have three options.

Option 1: Third-party AI search tracking. Tools like Profound, Otterly, and Peec are building dedicated AI search rank tracking. They send synthetic queries to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews and report whether your site was cited. Most are early but useful for benchmarking.

Option 2: Manual sampling. Pick 20 high-intent queries for your practice. Run them in AI Mode once a month and screenshot the results. It's tedious. It's also still the most reliable way to know if you're getting cited for the specific keywords that matter to your bottom line.

Option 3: Combine both. GSC tells you "how many times." A Profound-style tool tells you "for what queries." Together they give you a full visibility picture.

I'd run Option 2 for any practice that hasn't built an AI search baseline yet. It's free, takes 30 minutes a month, and gives you the qualitative signal GSC won't.

The "Block AI" Question

Every time a practice owner reads about AI Overviews, the same conversation comes up: should you block Google's AI from using your content?

You can. The Google-Extended robots.txt directive lets you opt out of generative AI features without blocking standard Search indexing.

Do not do this. I've had three practice owners ask me about it this month, usually after reading a panicked LinkedIn post about "AI stealing your content."

Blocking AI features removes you from the consideration set entirely. For healthcare queries where 88% of searches now include an AI summary, that means you've voluntarily disappeared from the top of the search results page for a huge chunk of patient research.

The right move is to optimize for AI citation, not opt out of it. If you're losing organic clicks because AI Overviews are answering questions before users click, the fix is to be the cited source, not to disappear.

I covered the broader playbook in The Complete Guide to Optimizing Your Website for Google's AI Search Features, and the AI Mode split-view post gets into why being cited matters more than being clicked.

What I'd Tell a Practice Owner This Week

If you run a single-location practice:

  1. Log into Search Console. If the new report is there, save your baseline. If it isn't, set a calendar reminder to check monthly.
  2. Audit your top three service pages for FAQ schema, question-format H2s, and direct first-paragraph answers. Those are the formats AI Overviews cite.
  3. Pick 10 high-intent queries and screenshot AI Mode results for each. That's your manual baseline.

If you run a DSO or multi-location group:

  1. Roll out the same "Generative AI performance" check across every property in GSC. Aggregate the data.
  2. Identify the top AI-cited pages per location. Standardize the patterns that work and roll them across locations. (Here's the playbook for keeping local brand intact while scaling.)
  3. Build a monthly AI visibility report that combines GSC impressions with manual sampling of 25 keywords across 5 locations.

If you're running an agency:

The clients who get the most value out of this are the ones whose agencies were already building question-based content with proper schema. If that's not you, this new report is going to make that gap obvious within 90 days. Get your house in order now. (My guide on evaluating your dental marketing agency covers what good actually looks like.)

The Bigger Picture

This is the smallest version of an AI visibility report Google could have shipped. No clicks, no queries, no AI Overview vs. AI Mode split. It's a baseline of a baseline.

But Google rarely ships AI features and then walks away. The standard Performance report had way fewer dimensions when it launched a decade ago, and now it's the single most-used SEO measurement tool on the planet. This is going to expand. Get familiar with it now.

The practices paying attention to AI search in June 2026 are going to be a year ahead of the ones still asking their agency "what's an AI Overview?" in 2027. Same playbook as every Google update before it: the early movers compound.

This is also one of the most under-covered shifts in dental marketing right now, which is why it keeps coming up at every conference where I speak. Practice owners are hearing "AI is changing search" everywhere and getting almost no practical guidance on what to actually do about it.

Got it? Good. Let's go.

Going deeper on AI search? The data Search Console gives you is the start of the answer. The work that gets you cited happens upstream: schema, content architecture, question-format H2s. I covered the full playbook in The Complete Guide to Optimizing Your Website for Google's AI Search Features and How to Use AI to Dominate "Dentist Near Me".

Sources

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