Search marketers now have a clearer signal that the job is changing. Google has rolled out Search Console reporting for generative AI features worldwide and expanded controls over how sites appear in those experiences, giving website owners new ways to see and manage whether their pages surface in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. For businesses trying to decide what AI search means for SEO, that matters more than another round of speculation about whether classic rankings are dead.
The practical change is straightforward: visibility in AI search is becoming its own measurable category. Google said the new reports show how often URLs from a site appeared in generative AI features, which pages appeared, the countries involved, the devices being used for Search results and performance over time with hourly, daily, weekly and monthly views. That does not replace the standard performance report, but it does separate out a layer of search presence that many marketing teams have struggled to quantify.
That shift may alter how businesses judge the value of content and digital PR. If search journeys increasingly begin inside AI-generated responses, then the winning question is not only where a page ranks on a results page. It is also whether a site is visible enough, clear enough and useful enough to be pulled into AI-led answers. For communications teams, that raises the importance of publishing material that can be discovered, interpreted and cited quickly by search systems designed to summarize information.
Google’s own guidance points in a similar direction. In its June update on new controls and insights for website owners, the company said it is giving publishers and brands more ways to navigate AI in Search while also encouraging sites to provide unique, non-commodity content, organize pages well, create a good page experience and supply high-quality images and video. Those are familiar SEO principles, but in the AI era they take on a slightly different purpose: helping a site become a better source, not just a better landing page.
From page rankings to source selection
There is also a strategic decision embedded in Google’s new controls. The company said website owners can use a Search Console toggle to decide whether their site can appear in and help ground responses in generative AI Search features. Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from those AI features, and Google said the setting will not act as a ranking signal outside them. For publishers and brands, that turns AI visibility into an explicit business choice rather than an ambient byproduct of being indexed on the web.
At the same time, the scale of the change is difficult to ignore. Google said AI Overviews now has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, while AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users. Whatever the eventual traffic patterns look like for individual sites, those figures suggest that AI-mediated discovery is no longer a side feature. It is becoming part of the main search environment in which marketers compete for attention.
For businesses, the message is less about abandoning established SEO than reordering priorities. Technical health, page structure and useful content still matter because they help systems understand what a page is about. But AI search puts extra pressure on substance and clarity. Commodity copy written to occupy keywords may be less helpful in a search environment that is trying to synthesize answers from the web. Material with a distinct point of view, timely facts or clearly organized expertise could have a better chance of being surfaced when search tools assemble responses.
That creates a fresh role for digital PR. Instead of treating coverage mainly as a pathway to referral traffic or a backlink, brands may need to think harder about how their information enters the wider web in forms that are current, attributable and easy for search systems to interpret. Original reporting, expert commentary and well-structured announcements can all contribute to that footprint, especially when they add something specific rather than repeating what is already widely available.
Adriaan Brits, CEO of Sitetrail, said “The exciting thing about this year’s event in San Diego is that we’ve just updated NewsPass to deliver live news from independent media within minutes of submission. Today, the focus is shifting—it’s less about earning a backlink and more about getting cited by AI for speed and accuracy. If you're open to stepping away from the old playbook, this new era of search and discovery offers incredible opportunities.”
Why digital PR may be judged differently
His comments point to a growing divide in search strategy. One approach still revolves around older signals of authority, especially the pursuit of links as an end in themselves. The other starts from the idea that speed, originality and source clarity may matter more when AI systems are selecting information to summarize. That does not make backlinks irrelevant, but it does suggest they are no longer the only shorthand for digital visibility that matters to marketing teams.
Google’s reporting rollout gives businesses a way to test that shift with more discipline. Teams can now examine whether specific pages are showing up in generative AI features, in which countries, and on which devices, then compare that presence over time. That may help answer practical questions that were previously hard to ground in data: whether a new content format is more visible in AI search, whether certain sections of a site are more likely to appear, or whether editorial and PR work is contributing to discoverability beyond conventional click-through patterns.
As the search community gathers in San Diego, the most useful debate may not be whether AI replaces SEO, but what kind of web publishing earns inclusion inside AI-mediated search at scale. With Google now exposing more of that layer in Search Console, the next question for brands is becoming sharper: what information are they producing that an AI system would actually choose to surface?
