Search Console is now a free AI visibility tracker

Yes. As of August 31, 2026, every site in Google Search Console has a free AI visibility tracker that counts how often AI Overviews and AI Mode showed your link. Viewfy reads it as a yes or no per page.

An AI visibility tracker is a report that shows whether AI answers surface your pages, and this one counts impressions only. No clicks, no queries, and no word about ChatGPT or Claude. That's still more than founders had before the rollout, so here's how to read it without getting excited or scared.

What did Google actually ship?

Two things, and both are now on every property worldwide: a generative AI performance report and a Search generative AI control that opts a site out of Google's AI features. Both live inside Google Search Console, which is a free Google service that shows site owners how their pages perform in Search. Search Engine Land reports the features started with a subset of sites before going to everyone.

The report is an expandable tab inside the main performance dashboard, according to Search Engine Roundtable. If you open Search Console and can't find it, you likely don't have enough impressions in these features yet. Google says the same on the report's help page.

AI-generated image

What does the report count, and what does it leave out?

One metric. Impressions are its only number, defined by Google as "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search." Google's help page for the report lists the breakdowns as pages, countries, dates and devices. AI Overviews and AI Mode are the two generative AI features on Google Search that the report covers, with Search Labs experiments, Google's opt-in test features, left out.

What's missing matters more than what's there. There is no query dimension, so you can't see which question triggered the impression. There are no clicks, so you can't see whether anyone came through. Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable both flag those two gaps.

Google's own caveats, plus one from the trade press:

• The standard 1,000-row limit applies, so long-tail pages fall off the table.
• Chart totals can differ from table totals.
• The newest data is preliminary and may change within hours.
• Some sites don't have the report yet because they lack enough impressions in these features.
• Search Engine Roundtable also notes an earlier bug that dropped performance data for some properties, so treat the early history with some suspicion.

Should you flip the Search generative AI opt-out?

No. Leave it on include, which is the default for every property. The control lives under Settings > Search generative AI and has three options, include, exclude, or inherit from parent. Excluding means your content stops appearing as links in Google's AI features, stops being used for grounding, and, in Google's words, "you won't receive any traffic or impressions from these features."

Grounding is a step that lets a generated answer draw on live web pages rather than only on what the model memorized. Cutting it off buys you nothing on ranking, because Google's help page for the control says it "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search." It also "doesn't affect AI training," since Google-Extended is the separate crawler control that handles training. Exclusion applies within 1 to 2 days, sometimes longer, because of caching and propagation.

The only founder who should exclude is one who has decided, on principle, not to appear in AI answers at all. Everyone else would be switching off the one tracker Google gives away in order to block traffic they wanted. Wrong lever.

Does this tell you anything about ChatGPT or Claude?

No. The report covers generative AI features on Google Search, and the control governs those same features. ChatGPT and Claude are outside both, and Google has no reason to report on them.

So the tracker answers a single question, whether Google's AI showed your link, and stays silent on the one founders actually ask, which is whether a chatbot will name them. If you want to know why ChatGPT names a competitor and skips you, the diagnosis starts somewhere Search Console can't see. It starts with whether the crawlers ChatGPT and Claude read with can reach your site at all. A page those crawlers can't fetch can't be cited, whatever the impressions column says.

How should a solo founder read the report?

As a yes or no per page. A page with impressions is one Google's AI is willing to show. A page with zero, after a few weeks of data, is one it isn't. That's the entire signal worth pulling out, and it's a useful one.

Here's the order I'd read it in:

• Sort the pages table by impressions and note which pages appear at all. Your how-to and comparison posts usually land here before your homepage does.
• Check the countries breakdown against where your buyers are. For a product sold in the US, US impressions are the ones to count.
• Ignore the daily chart wiggles, since the newest data is preliminary and can move within hours.
• Watch pages that go from zero to something after you publish or fix them. That's the closest thing to attribution the report offers.

Pages you publish daily give the report something to count. That's the argument for a post a day on your own domain, each one carrying one fact that's only true about your product. A thin post can earn an impression without earning a visit, and this report can't tell those apart.

How do you measure the visits that actually arrive?

Your own analytics, by referrer and landing page. An impression is a link that was shown. A visit is a person who arrived, and only the second one can sign up. The gap between them is where AI visibility dashboards get founders in trouble, because a score that climbs while signups stay flat is a vanity score.

That's why Viewfy asks your buying questions monthly and tracks visits that actually arrive, instead of reporting a score. Reddit replies get the same treatment. When a chatbot changes what it cites, the only honest readout is whether the thread still sends people.

Three habits that cost nothing:

• Keep a list of the pages Search Console shows with AI impressions, then check whether those same pages gain landing-page visits over the following weeks.
• Track signups by landing page, since a visit that never signs up is just a slower impression.
• Ask your buying questions in ChatGPT and Claude yourself once a month and write down who gets named, then compare that list with your referrers.

Where does Viewfy fit next to a free tracker?

On the parts Google doesn't cover. Viewfy is a growth agent for founders who ship: he finds the threads where buyers are asking, drafts the reply for your approval, writes your blog daily on your domain, ships SEO fixes as a pull request you merge, and earns mentions on sites AI models read. Search Console tells you whether Google's AI showed a link. Viewfy works on why it would.

Every thread reply and every editor pitch waits in a queue until you approve, edit or skip it. Pitches leave from your own address, and nothing is bought. Each morning at 7am you get one message with what changed, and if you reply kill, that day's post comes down within the minute. That's the whole dashboard.

We'll promise live mentions on real sites. What a chatbot says next month isn't ours to promise, and anyone who promises it is selling you the vanity score from two sections up. If you'd rather see the reply side first, here's how Reddit outreach works without reading as spam.

Start on the free tier at viewfy.ai, which gives you 100 drafts with no card. Paste your URL and see which threads he finds. Free tier limits are current as of today, September 7, 2026.