Search Console now reports how often a site appears inside AI Overviews and AI Mode answers. Google rolled the feature out on 3 June, starting with the UK. A question restaurants couldn't answer last week now has a number against it.
Impressions land before clicks do
The reports, authored by Hillel Maoz and Moshe Samet on the Search Central blog, expose five dimensions: impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, the specific pages that surfaced, the country the impression came from, the device the user was on, and the date — broken down hourly through monthly. There is no click data.
That gap is the one publishers asked about first, and it isn't an accident. Whether an AI Overviews appearance produces a downstream click is a question Google is trying to answer for itself, not yet a number it is willing to publish.
For a restaurant the asymmetry matters less. The impression is the surface a diner stares at. The model assembled an answer that included the venue's name and a fact about the menu. Whether the diner tapped through, or whether the answer itself was enough, is a different question. The visibility is the asset.
What the UK rollout means
Google's deployment "to a subset of website owners in the U.K., with a global rollout to follow" puts British restaurants at the front of the measurement curve. The CMA's engagement with Google over how publisher content is used in AI is the named reason. The UK has been at the front of this story for two years now, and it is still picking up new firsts.
A chain with properly marked-up menu pages across multiple sites can now ask a question it could not ask on Monday: how many times did each location turn up in an AI Overviews answer last week, on which queries, on which device.
The opt-out toggle is the other half
Google shipped a second toggle alongside the reports: a switch that opts a site out of appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features inside Discover. Google was explicit on the trade-off. Opting out forfeits any traffic or impressions from those surfaces, but does not depress the site in regular blue links.
The chains paying for schema are paying to be found. The opt-out makes that investment harder to justify, not easier.
For a publisher whose work is being read for free and cited briefly, opt-out is a defensible position. For a restaurant whose work is being chosen, it is a different sort of risk: opting out of the surface where the diner is already looking.
Measurement changes the conversation
Restaurant chains have been investing in Schema.org markup for two years on faith. The argument has been that the data is the asset and the surfaces are the consumers. Google's own analytics until last week could show impressions in regular search but said nothing about AI Overviews, AI Mode, or the assistant surfaces reading off the same index.
That spend now has something to point at in Search Console. The next budget conversation looks different.
Menu software that outputs Schema.org data as a by-product of routine updates — GMMO included — now sits upstream of a report that can show where that markup is surfacing.
Bing already had this
Bing Webmaster Tools has shipped a comparable AI performance report globally for some months, similarly without click data. For chains paying attention to Bing as the index ChatGPT Search and Copilot read through, the impressions story has been visible since the spring.
Google catching up on its own surface puts the larger half of the UK AI restaurant discovery picture into the measurement frame.
The opt-out toggle is the smaller story; the report is the larger one. A global rollout is expected by autumn, which means UK chains have a window to build a baseline before the rest of the market can see what they're seeing.