@tjrobertson52

Google is finally starting to share data about when you show up in their AI results. Up until now, it's just been a black box.

Google Search Console has shown us clicks to your website as well as impressions in traditional search results. But we've had no idea how often we're showing up in AI overviews or AI mode or new AI features.

Based on what we know from Google Io, it looks like all search will be AI search by the end of the summer. So this data is very important.

So let's talk about how you can access this data, what data Google will share with us, and why it's the most important data you can get for your website.

This data is rolling out now, starting in the UK. It'll be available inside Google Search Console in a new generative AI report. Looks exactly like the existing search report, except we aren't getting click data or query data, which means we're only seeing impressions.

But you'll be able to see every page on your website that showed up in generated AI and how many impressions it receives each day.

Now, technically, you will be able to see clicks. The main search report in Google Search Console shows all clicks to your website, even those from Generative AI. We just won't be able to see which clicks came from Generative AI.

As for the actual queries someone entered into Google Search before finding your website, Google has actually never shown us all of these. Google only shows us data for common queries.

Google says this is for privacy reasons, but I suspect they're also trying to cut costs and avoid us from gaming the system.

Now, there are a lot of supposed experts online telling you that you can see which queries were entered into generative AI by looking for long queries. Queries that are at least five words long, for example.

Here's the thing. Queries that are five words long or almost never common queries. So why would queries like that show up inside Google Search Console?

It's pretty simple. These queries are essentially always from rank tracking software. You're seeing a long or oddly specific query in your Google Search Console data, it means someone is tracking that query, most likely using rank tracking software.

And it's running that query once a day, once a week, to see where their website ranks. And they're apparently tricking half of the SEO agencies in the world into thinking that these are actual queries.

Truth is, because of AI, search queries are getting longer. They are getting more unique. Even if Google did show us that data, it would just be millions of unique queries with one impression.

Maybe someday Google will be generous and they'll aggregate all that data to show us the most common themes or topics people are searching for. But the way things are heading right now, it looks like we're gonna have to get used to having less and less query data.

And as fewer and fewer people are clicking directly from the search to a website, we're gonna have to rely more and more on impressions instead of clicks.

And so while the data from this new Generative AI report is limited, only showing us impressions to specific webpages, I think it's the best we could hope for right now.