Is Google's AI Using Your Website? Now You Can Check 

For about two years, the honest answer to “is Google’s AI using my website?” was a shrug.

You could see your Google traffic and your rankings. The AI summary sitting above both of them was a black box.

That gap closed on August 31.

What Google actually turned on

Search Console now has a generative AI performance report. It shows how many times links to your site appeared inside Google’s AI features.

Search Console is Google’s free dashboard for site owners, and if nobody at your church or business has ever set one up, that’s step one. Go to search.google.com/search-console, sign in with the Google account your organization actually uses, and see whether your domain is listed. If it isn’t there, nobody has set it up, and that’s the job before any of the rest of this.

Google announced the report on its Search Central blog on June 3, 2026, then spent the summer rolling it out to one slice of sites at a time. On August 31 it added a line to the top of that announcement: “As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide.” Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal both covered the global release that week.

The Search version of the report covers AI Overviews, which are the AI-written summaries at the top of a results page, and AI Mode, Google’s chat-style search tab. Google Discover, the feed of suggested articles on the Google app’s home screen, gets a separate report of its own.

How to read yours

The report counts impressions. Google defines that as how many times links to your site were shown to someone inside one of those AI features, whether or not they did anything about it.

Per Google’s help documentation, you can group the data four ways:

• Pages — which of your URLs turned up in an AI answer
• Countries — where the search happened
• Devices — desktop, tablet, or mobile, which Google notes is available for Search results
• Dates — hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly

Start with Pages. The size of your impression number is close to meaningless on its own, because you have nothing to compare it against. The page list is different: if Google’s AI keeps reaching for your homepage and never the page with your hours and service times on it, that’s a content problem with an address.

Two quirks before you read too much into any of it. Google’s documentation says the chart is aggregated by property, meaning the site as somebody registered it with Search Console, so two pages from your site appearing in the same AI answer count once between them. And the table caps at 1,000 rows, the same limit as the regular performance report.

What the report won’t tell you

Impressions. That’s the whole list.

You get how often you were shown. Clicks, click-through rate and the searches that pulled you in are all absent. Search Engine Land flagged the missing click data specifically when the reports went global. Google’s own post says it’s “continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights and data would be most helpful,” and names no date.

So the question you actually care about, whether any of this sends you anyone, stays unanswered, and it stays unanswered until Google adds clicks. The Pages list is the half you can get today.

Google also shipped a switch to turn it off

Under Settings, there’s now a Search generative AI control with three positions: include your site, which is the default for everyone, exclude it, or inherit the setting from a parent property, so if somebody registered both your main domain and a subdomain, the smaller one can follow whatever the bigger one is set to.

Exclude does exactly what it sounds like. Google’s documentation puts it plainly: “You won’t receive any traffic or impressions from these features.” Your pages stop being linked inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, and stop being used as source material for the answers those features write.

Changes take a few days. Google says content is generally excluded within one to two days of the control going live, and some pages take longer because Google’s stored copy of them takes a while to refresh.

Should a church or small business use it?

Almost certainly not. Here’s Google’s documentation on what happens when you exclude your site: “Content from other sites will still be available in those features, and it may appear similar to yours.”

The AI answer still gets written. Someone still tells the person asking when your church meets or whether you take emergency calls on weekends. It comes from a directory listing, or whatever old page Google can find. Opting out removes your name from the answer. It doesn’t remove the answer.

There’s a real argument on the other side, and it belongs to publishers. If your income depends on someone landing on your article and seeing an ad next to it, an AI summary that resolves the question up on Google’s page has taken your inventory and paid you nothing for it. That’s the publishers’ argument, and it’s a fair one.

The same mechanism costs you something, and it’s worth naming. Someone who gets your Sunday service time out of an AI summary may never load your site, and your analytics will never record that they were curious. If you’ve been using traffic numbers to justify the website to a board or a business partner, that conversation gets harder from here, and it will keep getting harder.

What survives is the outcome. Nobody’s budget depends on pageviews of a service-times page. The point of that page is that somebody shows up at 10:30.

Our take, which is a take and not a Google statement: if being cited is where the advantage sits in AI search, and we’ve argued that it is, then handing the citation to whoever else Google can find is a strange way to protect yourself.

The three switches people mix up

These get talked about interchangeably. Google’s documentation treats them as three separate settings:

1. The Search generative AI control governs whether your content can appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It lives in Search Console under Settings, and Google states it “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search.”
2. Google-Extended governs whether your content is used to train the models behind those features. It isn’t in Search Console at all; it’s a rule in your site’s robots.txt file, which is a small text file whoever maintains your site controls.
3. noindex keeps you out of Google Search entirely. It’s a one-line tag that’s easy to leave behind on a page after a redesign, and it costs you every result, AI or otherwise. Whether it’s on any of your pages is a question your web person can answer in about a minute.

If someone tells you they’ve blocked Google’s AI, it’s worth asking which of the three they did.

Where to start this week

Confirm that somebody currently on staff can sign into Search Console. If the only person who ever could has left the organization, that’s the first thing to fix, and it’s the login that makes everything in our church SEO guide checkable.

Then open the report and read the Pages list.

Go look at yours. Whatever’s on that list is what Google’s AI currently thinks your site is good for.