Google made AI visibility a setting. Set it right.
This summer, Search Console quietly gained three things: a switch that includes or excludes your site from Google’s AI answers, a report that measures how you perform inside them, and platform reports for social profiles. Together they mark the moment AI visibility became configurable — and measurable.
For two years, brands could only guess at their presence in Google’s AI layer. That is ending. Google is rolling out generative AI controls in Search Console beyond their UK debut: a setting that lets a site owner include or exclude their website from AI Mode, AI Overviews, and other generative features. The choice does not affect classic organic rankings — the ten blue links stay untouched either way.
The setting almost everyone should leave on
‘Include’ allows Google to use your content for grounding AI answers and to link to it; ‘Exclude’ removes you from that layer entirely. For publishers whose product is their content, exclusion is a genuine commercial question. For brands — businesses whose product is elsewhere and whose website exists to be found — the calculus is one-sided: excluded means invisible at the exact surface where a growing share of buying decisions forms. Being the grounding source for answers about your own category is not a leak; it is owning your narrative. Our advice matches Google’s own framing and most practitioners’: leave it on, deliberately.
Measurement arrives with it
The second change matters just as much: a Search generative AI performance report is gradually appearing in Search Console (look for a drop-down under ‘Search results’ in the left menu). For the first time, Google itself will show how a site performs inside its AI features — the metric layer that zero-click analytics could only approximate. When your traffic chart flattens while the market moves into answers, this is the report that shows whether you moved with it.
And your profiles become properties
Third: since July, Search Console supports platform properties for X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok — showing which queries surface your social profiles in Google’s results and which posts earn impressions. For brands whose discovery runs through short-form and social, search performance of those profiles is finally visible in the same tool as the website’s.
What to do this month
Three checks, ten minutes: open Search Console settings and confirm the generative AI control is set to include (or note it has not reached your account yet); look for the AI performance report and start a baseline the day it appears; and add platform properties for the profiles that matter to your discovery. None of this replaces the underlying work — content that earns citation — but for the first time, Google hands you both the switch and the scoreboard. If you want the baseline read for your brand, get in touch.
Sources
Google Search Central blog, July 2026 (platform properties) · Google Search Console Help, documentation on generative AI controls, 2026 · ROI Revolution, August 2026 SEO & GEO recap.
The switch is yours. So is the scoreboard.
We set brands up to be cited in AI answers — and now, to measure it in Google’s own report.
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