Google has officially started including data from its new AI Mode in Search Console reports. This means that metrics like clicks, impressions, and average position from AI-powered search results will now appear in your performance dashboard.

To support this change, Google has also updated its Search Console help documentation. The revised section on how impressions, clicks, and positions are defined now includes AI Mode-specific details.

What’s New in AI Mode Reporting?

According to the updated documentation, AI Mode data will be tracked using the same foundational principles as traditional Google Search:

  • Clicks: Any time a user clicks a link to an external site from within the AI response, it registers as a click.
  • Impressions: If your webpage appears anywhere in the AI-generated content, it’s considered an impression.
  • Position: Like standard results, elements in AI Mode, such as link cards, image blocks, or carousels, are ranked based on their qualifying search position. Each piece is measured individually, not grouped under one position like with AI Overviews.

Google also explained how it handles follow-up queries in AI Mode. When a user continues the conversation by asking additional questions, each new query is treated independently. As a result, any resulting impressions, clicks, or position data are associated with the new search, not the original one.

Why This Matters

Until now, digital marketers and SEO professionals lacked visibility into how AI-generated search experiences impacted website performance. While this update brings more transparency, it’s worth mentioning that Google still doesn’t allow filtering for just AI Mode data within Search Console, similar to the limitations with AI Overviews.

What Google Says About AI Mode

AI Mode builds upon the AI Overviews feature by offering a more dynamic, interactive experience. It structures user questions into subtopics and runs multiple parallel searches to find relevant answers, often displaying content through carousels, images, and link-rich cards.

These AI-driven responses are not just summaries; they guide users to useful web resources and give them opportunities to dig deeper into topics, often resulting in multiple metrics being recorded in the process.

Google’s AI Mode is reshaping what it means to search, discover, and engage. By expanding how intent is interpreted and tracked, it forces SEOs to look beyond rankings and keywords. Instead, we must focus on understanding human curiosity in layers.

Search Console’s integration of AI Mode is the first step toward more sophisticated SEO analytics, one that mirrors the complexity of real user journeys in 2025 and beyond. So, if you’re still optimizing for just one keyword per page, it’s time to rethink your approach. AI Mode shows us that search intent is no longer a straight line; it is a set of interconnected ideas.