AI Overviews Clicks in Search Console: How to Measure the October 15 Link Update
Table of Contents
Can you see AI Overview clicks in Search Console?
What did Google change on October 15?
What does the Generative AI report show, and what does it leave out?
How to measure the October 15 update: a before-and-after method
Where this post stops
FAQ
Can you see AI Overview clicks in Search Console?
Yes, but not as a separate number. Search Console's Generative AI performance report shows impressions only. Clicks from links in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted, but they sit inside the ordinary Web clicks in the Performance report, with nothing to mark them out. And every link inside an AI Overview gets the same reported position, so Google's October 15 change, which moved links higher inside AI answers, won't show up as a position change.
That's the short version. The rest is about what you can still learn from the numbers you do have, and where they stop being useful.
What did Google change on October 15?
On October 15, Hema Budaraju, Google's VP of Product Management, published "More ways to connect with the web from Search." It lists five changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews, and they aren't all at the same stage. Google's verbs are worth reading closely, because they tell you which changes might plausibly be in your data already.
The first is about inline links, the links set into words or phrases of an AI response. Google says it has made "continued and substantial increases to the presence of inline links" and is "launching updates to show inline links higher up in responses more frequently." The second is a section at the top of a response for the one or two official pages that handle a task, and here the wording is "We'll be testing." Third, the carousels for timely articles are "starting to roll out" to more locations and languages. Fourth, the links at the end of some responses get image thumbnails and what Google calls "a more clickable design." Fifth, Google "started testing" clickable creator and publisher names on video results in AI Mode.
inimino.org put these into a status table on October 16, which is a tidy way to keep them apart: increases made and updates launching for inline links, a test for the official-site section, a rollout for carousels, a redesign for the related-article links, and a test for creator names.
Google gave one number in the whole post. The number of people using its Preferred Sources feature "has grown by more than 7x since the start of the year." There is no click data. Barry Schwartz made the same point in Search Engine Land the day it came out, noting that Google still doesn't break out clicks in the AI performance reports in Search Console. Over at Search Engine Roundtable, he quoted what Google told him: "We're continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful to inform their strategies, and we'll introduce additional metrics over time." It names no metric and no date.
What does the Generative AI report show, and what does it leave out?
Google's help page for the Generative AI performance report (Search) is fairly plain about what's in it. It covers impressions for two features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and defines impressions as "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search." A note sits at the top of the page: "As of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide." The Search Central blog post that launched the reports on June 3 carries the same note, so the date holds across both.
| What the Generative AI report shows | What it doesn't show |
|---|---|
| Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode | Clicks |
| Breakdowns by page, country, date and device | Click-through rate |
| A search type filter for Web: text-based or Web: multimodal | Position |
| Data taken from the Web search type in the Performance report | A query breakdown (the help page lists only pages, countries, dates and devices) |
The clicks live somewhere else. Google's "What are impressions, position, and clicks?" page says, for AI Overviews, "Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click," and it gives the same rule for AI Mode. On position, it says "An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position." AI Mode is handled a little differently. Its position "follows the same methodology as a Google Search results page," and a follow-up question there counts as a new query, with its own impressions, position and clicks.
So the AI report is a slice, not an addition. The help page says it "includes data from the Web search type in the Performance report," and the June post says that data stays in the overall report too.
Which AI links never count as clicks?
Not every underlined phrase goes to a website. Matt G. Southern looked at this for Search Engine Journal on September 25. One recording he described showed underlined text inside an AI Overview opening an AI Mode conversation instead of a web page. That was one search, recorded once, and SEJ treated it that way.
The rule that might apply is the query refinement. Google's help page calls a link that runs a new Google search a query refinement, and says "If a link is a query refinement link, clicks and impressions are not counted for that link." Its general rule is that "clicking a link that stays inside the Google platform is not counted as a click." SEJ said it isn't clear whether the element in that recording is classed as a refinement, and the help pages don't settle it. For now it's an open question.
The creator-name test is clearer about where it goes, if not about how it's logged. Google's post says those names link "directly to their Search profiles in AI Mode," and Search Engine Land adds that it "does not take you to the creator's own web site." A tap lands on a Google page first.
Why you can't calculate an AI click-through rate
SEJ put it in one line: "Dividing overall clicks by AI-only impressions doesn't produce a click-through rate for AI features." The clicks cover every Web click your site earned, from every kind of result, while the impressions count only AI features, so the two numbers describe different things.
There's a second wrinkle. The chart in the AI report totals impressions by property. If two of your pages appear in one AI answer, the help page says "they count as a single impression in the chart total." Add a URL filter, or look at the Pages table, and each page gets its own count. The chart and the table can disagree, and both are right.
How to measure the October 15 update: a before-and-after method
What you can do is look at clicks on the pages AI features already show, before and after the date. getlooploop.com suggested exactly this on October 18: compare clicks on the landing pages that appear in AI answers before and after October 15, not positions. Here is one way to set that up. It won't give you a clean answer, but it gives you a fair one.
Find the pages that get AI impressions. Open the Generative AI report, go to the Pages tab, and set the dates to the weeks before October 15. List the URLs with impressions. These are your AI-exposed pages. If you've built content in clusters for topical authority, you'll often see several pages from the same cluster here at once.
Mark October 15 on your charts. inimino suggests annotating the date. Keep in mind that Google gave no date range for the inline-link increase, and its post calls the increases "continued." A step in your chart near that date may be this change, or it may not.
Pull Web clicks for those pages. In the Performance report, set the search type to Web and filter by page. Use equal windows on either side of October 15, matched by day of week, so a busy week isn't set against a quiet one. Search Console dates are in Pacific Time, which matters if you're lining them up with analytics kept in another zone.
Compare against pages with no AI impressions. Pages that never appear in the AI report make a rough baseline for whatever moved across the whole site. This is a method suggestion, not a Google rule. It's crude, but it's better than reading one line on its own.
Read the result as a change in clicks, not a cause. If Web clicks rose on the AI-exposed pages and not on the baseline, that fits the update. It doesn't prove it. Clicks from AI links aren't labeled, and a page that shows up in AI Overviews usually shows up in ordinary results too.
Don't use position as the signal. In an AI Overview, a link that moves higher inside the answer keeps the same reported position, because the whole overview holds one position. Watching average position for a jump won't tell you anything about this change.
The "after" window will be short the first time you run this. It gets more useful as the weeks fill in, so it's worth rerunning rather than calling it early.
What else could move your numbers in the same window?
Two things, mainly. The first is other changes in Search. The Search Status Dashboard lists the September 2026 spam update as its latest ranking entry, starting September 24 and lasting 13 days and 16 hours, which takes it to about October 8, the end date getlooploop gives. If your "before" window overlaps it, some pages may have been moving for reasons that have nothing to do with links in AI answers. Our piece on Google's AI content policy covers what those updates go after.
The second is your own site: seasonal demand, new posts, pages you rewrote or pruned. Any of these can shift clicks in the same weeks, and none of them will announce itself in the report.
Where this post stops
To improve how your pages appear in AI answers, see how to write for AI Overviews. To read the queries behind your AI impressions, see what AI-search queries look like in Search Console.
And if you're producing the pages that end up in these reports, StealthGPT's SEO Writer drafts structured posts you can add your own expertise to before they go live.
FAQ
Does Search Console show clicks from AI Overviews?
Yes, but only inside total Web clicks in the Performance report. Google's help page says a click on an external link in an AI Overview counts as a click. The Generative AI report itself shows impressions only.
What does the Search Console Generative AI report show?
Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, date and device. Google says it rolled the report out to all sites worldwide as of August 31, 2026.
Did my position change after the October 15 update?
Probably not for links inside an AI Overview. Search Console gives every link in an AI Overview the same position, so a link moving higher inside the answer doesn't change it.
Can I calculate a click-through rate for AI Overviews?
No. Web clicks include every Web result, while the AI report counts only AI-feature impressions, so dividing one by the other doesn't give you an AI CTR.
Do AI Mode inline links always send clicks to my site?
No. Some links inside AI answers open a new Google query or a Google profile page. Under Search Console's rules, links that run a new query or stay inside Google don't count as clicks to your site.
