Days after UK regulators ordered Google to give publishers control over AI features, Google started shipping the plumbing. This week brought two concrete, dashboard-level changes every publisher needs to understand: you can finally see how often your content shows up in Google’s AI answers — and you’ll soon be able to turn that off.
01What’s new
1. Search Generative AI performance reports (live June 3). Search Console now includes dedicated reports showing your site’s impressions inside generative AI features — AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI in Discover. You get impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates.
2. An opt-out toggle (effective June 17). Google is rolling out a control that lets website owners block their content from being shown in and around AI features — AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover — both as links and for “grounding” (using your content to generate the answer). Crucially, Google says opting out carries no organic ranking penalty.
Both are launching first to a subset of website owners in the UK — not a coincidence, given the CMA’s Strategic Market Status designation days earlier — with a global rollout to follow.
02The metric that’s conspicuously missing
Here’s the catch the SEO community flagged immediately: the new reports show impressions, but not clicks, click-through rate, or traffic. You can now prove Google is using your content in AI answers. You cannot, from this report, prove that it sends you anyone.
That asymmetry is the whole publisher problem in a single dashboard. AI answers borrow your authority to satisfy the user on Google’s page, and the official analytics will happily quantify the borrowing while staying silent on the payback. Read the report for what it is: evidence of value extracted, not value returned.
The off switch publishers have demanded for two years is now a toggle in a Google dashboard — and a report that finally quantifies what AI is taking.
03The decision the toggle forces
For the first time, “block or don’t block?” stops being a blunt all-or-nothing robots.txt gamble and becomes a real, penalty-free product setting. That makes the strategic question unavoidable:
- Opt out and you protect your content from grounding AI answers — but you may disappear from a search surface that is rapidly becoming AI-first, ceding that visibility to competitors who stay in.
- Stay in and you keep AI-era discoverability — but you keep feeding the system that answers users without sending them to you.
There’s no universal right answer, and that’s the point. The smart move is to make the call by content type, using the new impression data plus your own traffic analytics to see where AI presence still pays and where it’s pure leakage.
04What publishers should do this quarter
05The bottom line
The off switch publishers have demanded for two years is now a toggle in a Google dashboard — and a report that finally quantifies what AI is taking. Use both. But remember what Google didn’t give you: the click data that would let you prove the trade is fair. Measure the gap yourself, decide content-type by content-type, and don’t flip a single switch on instinct.