I checked if AI Overviews send my sites any real traffic. Zero, across three sites.
Been hearing that AI search is quietly eating everyone's clicks, so I pulled the actual Search Console data on three real sites instead of assuming.
Checked AI Overview impressions, AI Mode clicks and Gemini citations for each. Every number came back zero. Not low, zero, across the board.
One of the sites has actually been cited by ChatGPT and Gemini a few times, tracked through a separate visibility tool, not GSC. None of that shows up as a click in Search Console yet.
Whatever moved clicks and impressions on these sites this month was backlinks and normal indexing, not anything AI search related. For a smaller site with no existing authority, the AI traffic story is still mostly theoretical.
Is anyone actually seeing AI Overview or AI Mode clicks land in their own GSC data, or is this a bigger-site-only thing so far?
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the number that would worry me here is that it is exactly zero on all three. not low, zero, across three different sites. that is usually instrumentation rather than reality.
as far as i know gsc does not break ai overview impressions out into their own bucket, they get folded into the normal web search totals. so a field that says ai overviews and reads zero probably means "not reported separately" rather than "did not happen". your own evidence points the same way, you already know chatgpt and gemini have cited one of those sites, and that citation exists whether or not the console has a column for it.
the conclusion i do believe though. backlinks and indexing moved your numbers this month and nothing else did. that matches what i see, and it is why i am still spending time on boring directory links instead of ai visibility tooling.
what would actually settle it is server logs. the ai crawlers identify themselves and referrer strings from chatgpt and perplexity show up there even when the console shows nothing. have you looked at raw logs rather than gsc?
@jernej_jan_kocica Haven't looked at raw logs, only GSC and a third-party visibility tool so far. Good point that a zero AI Overviews bucket might just mean unreported, not absent, especially with citations already confirmed elsewhere. What's actually distinguishable in a raw log line, a referrer string, a user agent, or both? Want to know what to grep for before I trust another zero.
@abdullah_javaid3 both, but they answer different questions and only one of them is traffic.
user agents tell you a bot came and read the page. worth grepping: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, ClaudeBot. GPTBot is training, OAI-SearchBot is the index, and ChatGPT-User is the interesting one because it fires when a live user session fetches your page mid conversation.
referrers tell you a human clicked. chatgpt.com, chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com. that is the number you actually went to gsc looking for.
the bad news for your specific question though: ai overview clicks do not carry their own referrer. they arrive as plain google.com, same as any organic click. so ai overviews are the one bucket you cannot isolate from logs either, and that particular zero may never be resolvable. everything non google, chatgpt and perplexity especially, shows up clean.
@jernej_jan_kocica That actually closes it. The zero was never wrong, it just is not a number GSC or logs can produce for that specific bucket. Explains why the citation tool and GSC disagree, they are not measuring the same thing at all. Dropping the AI Overview number and just tracking citations going forward, that is the only piece of this actually observable.
One gap in the log approach, and it catches Cloudflare sites hardest.
A zero in your logs has two causes that look identical from the inside. Either nothing came, or the edge turned the request away before your origin ever wrote a line. Cloudflare has a toggle for blocking AI scrapers, on by default for some zones depending on when they were set up, and a request refused there never reaches the log you would be grepping.
Separating the two takes about a minute. Curl your own homepage once per user agent and read the status code back.
I reran ours against production this morning. GPTBot 200. OAI-SearchBot 200. ChatGPT-User 200. PerplexityBot 200. ClaudeBot 200. So an empty log on our side really does mean nobody came, which is a different problem from being blocked, and a much better one to have.
None of that rescues the AI Overview bucket, that part looks settled above. It does mean the citation number you are keeping is worth pairing with a check that the crawler can physically reach you.
@supplymo Fair distinction, hadn't separated blocked from empty. If the citation tool ever flags something the crawler log doesn't, that is the order I'd check it in now, status code per user agent first, before touching the AI Overview question again.