Where does your home page rank in Google's new Generative AI performance report?
Google this week completed the worldwide rollout of its new Generative AI performance report in Google Search Console. The report shows how often pages from a website appear in Google's generative AI Search features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The new report lets website owners see which pages are appearing in generative AI results, along with information about the countries and devices where those impressions occurred. Unlike the regular Search performance report, however, it does not currently provide click or query data.
I took a look at the reports for several of our websites and found the results interesting. In particular, I noticed a tremendous variation in where the home page ranked among the pages receiving generative AI impressions. On one site the home page was the number one page, while on another it ranked 86th.
Since the rank of a home page can be compared across websites regardless of how much traffic or how many impressions a site receives, I thought it would make an interesting question for this week's poll:
Where does your home page rank in Google's new Generative AI performance report?
By "rank," I simply mean where your home page appears in the report when the pages are listed from most to fewest impressions. For example, if two pages have more impressions than your home page, its rank is #3.
As always, in addition to voting in the poll, please share what you are seeing in a post. Were you surprised by where your home page ranked? What types of pages are receiving the most generative AI impressions? Are your top pages primarily current content, or are older pages also appearing prominently? If you manage more than one website, are you seeing significant differences among them?
For the GPWA website, the home page ranks third. What I found particularly interesting was what ranked above and below it. Seven of the ten pages receiving the most generative AI impressions are forum threads, and the top page has more than four times as many impressions as the home page.
The results also aren't limited to recent discussions. For example, one of the top pages is a forum thread asking whether Elijah Wood and other principal actors from The Lord of the Rings earn money from LOTR games. That discussion dates back many years, yet it ranks second in the GPWA's generative AI impressions.
Overall, the results suggest that Google's generative AI features are surfacing some very specific discussions buried fairly deeply within the GPWA forum, including older content that I certainly would not have predicted would be among the site's top pages in the report.
Michael
