Google Search Console AI Report: A Vancouver Guide

Every Vancouver business owner we speak to asks a version of the same question: are we showing up in the AI answers, and is it worth anything? Until recently the honest answer was that nobody could measure the first half properly. That has changed.

Google says the dedicated generative AI performance report, along with the Search generative AI control, reached websites worldwide on August 31, 2026. It is the first official surface for AI exposure. It is also narrower than most people expect, and reading it without a second stage will lead you to the wrong conclusions.

What the report measures

The dedicated report counts impressions — occasions where your site appeared as a source in Google's generative AI experiences. You can break those impressions down by:

• Page
• Country
• Device
• Date

That is a genuinely useful set of dimensions. Page tells you which content earns citations. Country separates Canadian exposure from noise. Device shows whether the surface behaves differently on mobile. Date lets you trend it.

What the report does not show

This is the part to be pedantic about, because assuming otherwise wastes months. As it currently stands, the dedicated report does not expose:

• Clicks
• Queries
• Click-through rate
• Average position
• The specific passage that was cited
• A split between AI Overviews and AI Mode

So you can see that a page was used, and how often, but not what question prompted it, what text was lifted, or whether anyone came to your site afterwards. One further limit worth repeating in every report you send a client: impressions are site visibility, not search volume. They say nothing about how many people searched a topic — only about how often your site turned up.

The two-stage measurement model

Because the report stops at exposure, we run it as stage one of two. The whole point is that neither stage means much alone.

Stage one — exposure, inside Search Console

1. Export AI impressions by page for a full settled period, typically the last 28 complete days.
2. Filter to Canada, and to British Columbia-relevant pages if your business is local.
3. Split by device, since mobile and desktop often diverge.
4. Record the date range in the report itself, because the surface is new and its coverage is still expanding.

Stage two — outcomes, outside Search Console

1. Take the same page list into analytics and pull sessions, engaged sessions and conversions for the identical date range.
2. Match those conversions to your CRM to separate qualified leads from form noise.
3. Attach revenue evidence where a closed deal can be traced back to the entry page.
4. Compare the exposure trend to the qualified-lead trend, page by page.

Three patterns come out of that comparison. Exposure up and leads up means you are being cited on commercially relevant questions — do more of that content. Exposure up and leads flat usually means informational citations with no buying intent; treat it as brand awareness and stop reporting it as pipeline. Exposure flat while organic rankings are strong is a technical problem, and it is the one we diagnose most often.

The baseline checklist

Before the report can support a decision, get these in place. It takes an afternoon.

• Confirm the property. Domain properties cover every subdomain and protocol; URL-prefix properties do not.
• Fix the date range convention. Use complete settled days only, and use the same range in every stage-two pull.
• Freeze a page list. Your money pages, service pages and top guides. Compare against that list every month rather than whatever happens to rank.
• Name the conversion definitions. Write down what counts as a qualified lead before you look at any data.
• Label evidence. Mark each number as Search Console, analytics or CRM. Mixed-source totals are how reports lose credibility.
• Baseline for four weeks. No week-over-week claims before that.

What to do in the first month

1. Verify the report is present on your property.
2. Export a 28-day baseline of AI impressions per page.
3. Cross-reference against your strongest organic pages. Large gaps get a crawler, structured data and entity review — in that order.
4. Add qualified leads and revenue for the same pages beside the exposure column.
5. Re-run at 45 days and decide content priorities from the paired view, not from impressions alone.

If you would like this built as a standing report rather than a spreadsheet exercise, our reporting dashboards pair the exposure data with lead and revenue evidence, and our AEO services handle the citation signals behind it.