Obility Editorial · · 4 min read
Both consoles now report AI visibility, in different units
Until this year, a site owner who asked how often Google’s AI features showed their pages got one answer from Google’s documentation: that activity is folded into the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, with no way to pull it out. On June 3, 2026, Google announced a separate generative AI performance report in Search Console, and the announcement now notes that it reached all websites worldwide on August 31. Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Tools has its own AI Performance report, covering Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and what Microsoft calls select partner AI integrations.
These are the first numbers most teams will get about AI answers directly from the engines that produce them, so they are worth opening this week. They also count different things, and several widely shared guides describe them as more than they are. Read what each one measures before either number goes into a board deck.
Google’s report counts impressions of your links
According to Google’s Search Console help center, the generative AI report counts how many times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode. You can group the data by page, country, device and date, and filter between text searches and multimodal ones such as Google Lens and Circle to Search. Google’s announcement lists impressions as the metric and says other metrics may be added over time.
There is no clicks column and no queries tab. Some popular guides describe dedicated AI Overviews and AI Mode segments with clicks and click-through rate; Google’s own documentation describes neither, and it lists both features inside one report without a way to split them. Clicks from AI features do exist, but only in the main Performance report, mixed into Web search. There, Google’s help page says every link inside an AI Overview is assigned the single position the overview occupies, so an average position near the top can partly reflect AI Overview appearances.
Bing shows the phrases behind a citation, from a sample
Bing’s report counts citations: the times a page from your site was visibly referenced as a source in an AI answer. It adds grounding queries, which Microsoft defines as the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content it then cited. Microsoft is explicit that these are grouped, generalized phrases, not the questions people typed.
Newer additions classify those phrases by intent and topic and show a Citation Share, your percentage of all citations for a given grounding query. Microsoft’s help page says Citation Share does not reveal which other sites hold the rest. It also says the data is a sample, that very low activity may not surface, that totals can differ between views, and that a citation does not represent a click or a visit.
Neither report sees a mention without a link
Both reports start from a link to your site. Google counts links shown; Bing counts visible citations. If an answer recommends your product by name but cites a review site, a competitor’s comparison page or nothing at all, your company was in the answer and your console records nothing. The reverse happens too: your documentation can be cited to support one sentence in an answer that recommends three of your competitors, and Bing will count that as a citation for you.
Neither report shows the answer text, the brands it recommended, or the prompt the buyer typed. Microsoft states that its data does not show individual AI answers, exact prompts or why a page was referenced, and Google’s report has no query dimension at all. Each also covers only its own surfaces. OpenAI’s help center tells site owners how to become eligible for ChatGPT search, by letting OAI-SearchBot crawl and allowing OpenAI’s published search bot IP addresses, and says placement is not guaranteed. It describes no report of how often your pages were cited.
Use the consoles for where, and prompts for what
Take an illustrative case. A software company sees its Google AI impressions concentrated on its pricing and integrations pages, while Bing shows citations under grounding phrases such as “invoice approval software”. That tells the team which pages the engines find usable and roughly which subject areas they are cited for. It does not tell them whether an answer to “best invoice approval software for a 50 person finance team” names the company, what it says about price, or who is listed ahead of it.
That second half needs direct observation: a fixed set of buyer prompts, run on a schedule, with the answer text, named competitors and cited URLs saved together. Obility’s Answer Engine Insights is organized this way, with prompts grouped by audience and buying stage, the surrounding answer, recommended competitors and cited sources reviewed together, and each gap given an owner. The console numbers then tell you whether the pages you changed are shown or cited more often. The prompt observations tell you whether the answer itself moved.
Two cautions apply to both reports. Microsoft says its trends cannot be attributed to a specific cause, and the same holds for Google’s numbers: a rise after a content update may come from shifting demand or a model change. And a low or missing count is not proof a page was never used. Bing samples its data, and Google says its report may not appear at all for a site with too few impressions. Treat both as evidence about your links, not a verdict on your brand.