See AI Overview Clicks and CTR in Search Console (Free Extension)

TL;DR: Google’s AI Overviews report in Search Console shows impressions only, no clicks and no CTR. I built a free Chrome extension that drops Clicks and CTR right next to those AI Overview impressions, in the same window, live. It cannot show clicks attributed to an AI Overview, because Google does not expose that anywhere, but it lets you compare your AI-Overview impressions against your real Search clicks and CTR for the same property, date range, and filters, side by side on one chart.

On June 3, 2026, Google finally gave Search Console an AI Overviews report. I opened it the same afternoon and, within a minute, hit the wall every SEO is hitting. It shows impressions, and almost nothing else. No clicks. No CTR. The two numbers I actually optimise around were simply missing.

So I built the thing I wanted: a free Chrome extension that puts Clicks and CTR right beside the AI Overview impressions, in the same report, with one click. This post is the whole story. What the report shows and does not show, what you can and cannot honestly measure, how the extension works, how to use it for real CTR analysis, and how to install it.

The blind spot: AI Overview impressions, invisible clicks

Search Console’s AI Overviews report shows how often you appear inside an AI Overview, but never how many clicks or what CTR that exposure produced. That is the gap in one sentence.

Search Console's Generative AI features report (June 2026): impressions only, no clicks, no CTR.

Google launched the report, officially the Generative AI features performance report, in beta in June 2026. Its first version gives you Impressions, plus Pages, Countries, Devices, and Dates. What it withholds is the entire right side of the funnel: clicks, CTR, position, and query data. Google’s own announcement of the Gen AI performance reports confirms the scope.

For an SEO, that is half a dashboard. You can see that AI Overviews are showing your site more and more, but you cannot tell whether that exposure helps your traffic, hurts it, or does nothing. You cannot tell a healthy pattern from a worrying one. And you cannot put the AI surface next to your normal Search performance without exporting both reports and rebuilding a chart in a spreadsheet, then redoing it every time the date range changes.

That blind spot, visible impressions and invisible clicks, is the entire reason this extension exists.

Can you actually see clicks from AI Overviews?

Let me be straight about this, because the honesty is the point.

Google does not report the clicks that came specifically from an AI Overview. This extension does not claim to, and it can’t. That attribution data is not exposed anywhere.

Clicks from AI features do exist in your data. They are folded into the overall "Web" search type in the standard Performance report. But there is no switch that isolates a click from an AI Overview from a click on a normal blue link. Other practitioners have tested this and reached the same conclusion: AI Overview queries are anonymised and the clicks are not separable. JC Chouinard documents the click-tracking limits in detail, and Brodie Clark’s Search Console AI experiment lands in the same place.

So what does the extension actually give you? It puts two things that used to live in separate views into one window:

• Your AI Overview impressions, the AI surface, exactly as the native report shows them.

• Your Search clicks and CTR, for the same property, the same date range, and the same filters.

That is a comparison, not an attribution, and the comparison is where the value sits. The relationship between the two lines is the signal. When AI-Overview impressions climb while your clicks and CTR flatten, that is the "answered in the overview" pattern showing up in your own data. When both move together, AI exposure is still feeding clicks. You cannot read that relationship when the two numbers live on different screens. Put them side by side and the story appears.

See Clicks and CTR beside AI Overview impressions: the free extension

The extension does one job, and it does it the moment you open the report. Go to the AI Overviews report, and the clicks are already there.

The companion panel sits directly beneath the native report and adds Clicks, Impressions and CTR for the same property, range and filters.

It adds a companion panel directly beneath Search Console’s native AI Overviews chart, showing:

• Clicks, the metric the AI report leaves out.

• AI Overview Impressions, what the native report shows.

• CTR, derived from the two.

• A dual-axis line chart plotting Clicks against Impressions over time, with a hover tooltip for exact daily values.

It is live and contextual. It follows the report’s current property, date range, and filters automatically. Change the range and it updates. No exports, no spreadsheets, no manual stitching, though a refresh button is there if you want it.

There is also a toolbar popup that mirrors the same numbers, Clicks, Impressions, and CTR, plus a sparkline and a live status, so you can glance at the state without scrolling the report.

What you get, in one list:

• Clicks and CTR shown beside AI Overview Impressions, in the same window.

• A report-level comparison that follows the current property, date range, and filters.

• A dual-axis Clicks-vs-Impressions chart with a daily hover tooltip.

• Live updates as you change ranges and filters, with no exports.

• A toolbar popup with Clicks, Impressions, CTR, a sparkline, and a live working status.

• Works with multi-account Search Console, the /u/0/, /u/1/ URLs.

• An instant-feel UI, with clear loading, empty, and error states.

• 100% in-browser. No servers, no tracking, no data leaves your machine.

• A single minimal permission: host access to Search Console only.

Native AI report vs. the Clicks Companion, at a glance:

How to use it: from AI Overview impressions to a real CTR read

The panel earns its keep when you stop staring at one number and start reading the relationship between two. Here are the analyses I run with it.

Clicks against AI Overview impressions on one dual-axis chart, with CTR derived live for the current range.

1. Read the "answered in the overview" divergence. On one property and range, watch for AI-Overview impressions rising while Clicks and CTR flatten or dip. That gap is the clearest sign the answer is being satisfied inside the overview. When both climb together, AI exposure is still feeding clicks.

2. Track CTR across an AI Overviews expansion or a core update. Set the range across a known rollout and read CTR beside AI-Overview impressions in one window, so you are judging your own data, not industry averages.

3. Measure before and after a content change. Mark the date you shipped a change, then compare the AI-Overview impression line against Clicks and CTR over the following weeks to see if it moved either surface.

4. Segment it. The panel follows the report’s current filters, so filter the AI report to a country, device, or page and read Clicks against AI-Overview impressions for just that slice.

5. Triage a portfolio fast. Across multi-account properties, open each property’s AI report and glance at the toolbar popup’s Clicks, Impressions, and CTR to spot the properties with impression growth but no matching click growth.

6. Pull one-glance client visuals. Screenshot the dual-axis Clicks-vs-Impressions chart for a property and range straight into a deck, instead of exporting two reports and rebuilding the chart by hand.

None of these tell you a click came from an AI Overview. All of them tell you how your AI-Overview exposure and your real clicks move in relation to each other, which is the closest honest read the data allows.

How it works: the surface flip, no spreadsheets

The trick is smaller than you would expect, and it lives inside Search Console’s own plumbing.

Search Console’s charts are fed by an internal Google request, an endpoint called batchexecute (RPC id OLiH4d). That request carries a "surface" parameter that decides which result context the numbers describe:

• Surface 1, Web results, returns clicks, impressions, CTR, and position.

• Surface 4, AI features, returns impressions only.

The native AI Overviews panel shows impressions only because Google does not return clicks for surface 4. The extension re-asks Search Console its own question with the surface flipped from 4 to 1, so the clicks come back, then merges the two responses by day. It is not scraping Google and it is not a workaround bolted on from outside. It is the same data Search Console already has, asked the way the Web report asks it.

There are two ways it gets the data. Most of the time it passively watches the request Search Console itself makes for the AI report, reads the impressions, then replays the identical request with the surface set to Web to retrieve the clicks. But Search Console is a single-page app, and it often serves a date range straight from its own client-side cache with no network request at all. When there is nothing to watch, the extension issues both requests itself, inside your own logged-in session, using a fresh security token it reads from the page.

The hardest part was not the surface flip. It was that caching. Early on, switching to a range the extension had not seen could leave the panel blank, because the data never hit the network. The fix was to keep one re-datable base request from a clean view and, when you land on a range with no stored template, synthesise the request by swapping in that range’s day count, with guard rails so it never shows the wrong numbers. It only synthesises clean, unfiltered, last-N-day views, and a row-count sanity check rejects an implausible response and shows an empty state rather than guessing. A verified result is then cached as the real template, so the next visit to that exact view is instant.

A note on privacy and your data

Every request the extension makes is same-origin, inside your own authenticated Search Console session, using your own token. Nothing is sent to any third-party server. There is no tracking, no analytics, and no data collection. The only permission it asks for is host access to search.google.com/search-console. It cannot see your other tabs, and it stores nothing beyond a small request template in local storage, with the security token always stripped before it is saved.

Tips, quirks, and troubleshooting

This is a version 1.0.0, and it leans on Search Console’s private internals, so it has the odd rough edge. Three habits clear almost everything.

• Keep it to one Search Console tab. Several GSC tabs open at once can cross the wires on which view the panel is reading. One tab, one report.

• If data does not show, hard refresh. Use Cmd+Shift+R on Mac, or Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows. A hard refresh reloads the report cleanly so the extension can capture a fresh request.

• If a range is slow or blank, toggle the dates. Search Console often serves a range from its own cache with no network call, so there is nothing to read. Switch to another date range and back to force a fresh fetch.

If you ever see an empty panel, that is the extension refusing to guess rather than handing you a wrong number. Toggle the range or hard refresh, and it catches up.

How to install it

There are two paths. The Chrome Web Store listing is the easy one once review clears. The developer-mode path works right now.

The extension running locally after Load unpacked, version 1.0.0.

From the Chrome Web Store (once live):

1. Open the Chrome Web Store listing.

2. Click Add to Chrome.

3. Open Search Console and go to the Generative AI (AI Overviews) report. The clicks appear automatically.

Right now, load unpacked:

1. Download the extension zip (about 36 KB).

2. Unzip it.

3. Go to chrome://extensions.

4. Turn on Developer mode, top right.

5. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.

6. Open Search Console, open the Generative AI (AI Overviews) report, and you are done.

FAQ

Does this show clicks that came from AI Overviews specifically? No. Google does not report click attribution for AI Overviews anywhere. The extension shows your Search clicks and CTR for the same property, range, and filters, so you can compare them against AI-Overview impressions in one window.

Where does the clicks data come from? From your own Search Console data, fetched inside your own logged-in session, the same source Search Console uses for its Web Performance report. Nothing is scraped from third parties and nothing leaves your browser.

Is my data safe? Yes. All processing is in-browser. No external servers, no analytics, no data collection. The only permission is host access to search.google.com/search-console.

Does it work with multiple Search Console accounts? Yes, including the multi-account /u/0/, /u/1/ URLs.

Will it slow Search Console down? No. It reuses Search Console’s own data request and caches results per session, so switching ranges feels instant.

Is it affiliated with Google? No. It is an independent companion tool that reads your own report data.

How much does it cost? It is free.

I build tools like this because measurement is where AI search gets fuzzy, and fuzzy measurement leads to bad decisions. If you want your AI-search visibility instrumented and grown properly, see my AI search consulting, or follow Search Bytes for confirmed Google and AI-search changes as they ship.

Made by Devendra Saini, an SEO expert and consultant in India, with ♥ in India. Connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me what to build next.