Google has confirmed a logging error is undercounting impressions in Search Console’s Generative AI performance report for data starting August 13, and the entry on its data anomalies page is still open. John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, told a user on Bluesky the drop is “not representative of visibility changes in Search.”
The confirmation appears on Google’s Data anomalies in Search Console help page, under Performance reports. The entry, verbatim: “A logging error caused a decrease in impressions on the Generative AI performance report in Search for data starting on August 13, 2026. This issue affects data logging only and is ongoing.” Google names only the Generative AI report. It does not mention clicks, the standard Search performance report, or Discover, and it gives no size for the drop, no cause, and no fix date.
Mueller: not a visibility change, annotation coming
The Bluesky thread started Monday when Juan, posting as jcvrgs.bsky.social, flagged a “decline in impressions in the Generative AI report in GSC since Aug 13th/14th” alongside a drop in citations, and asked whether Google had changed something in AI Overviews. Mueller replied the same day: “Hi Juan, we’re aware of this issue and working on resolving it. This is just a logging issue and not representative of visibility changes in Search. We’re adding an annotation in Search Console to let folks know about this in the near future.” Mueller described the annotation as still to come, so it was not in the product at the time of his reply.
What is the Search Console Generative AI report logging error?
Google’s Generative AI performance report in Search counts impressions only, drawn from the same Web search data behind the standard Performance report, as we detailed when access widened to more properties earlier this month. Since August 13, a logging error has been undercounting those impressions, and Google says the issue is ongoing with no fix date given. Google states plainly that this affects data logging, not a site’s actual visibility in Search.
Practitioners describe a wider drop Google hasn’t confirmed
Separately from Google’s confirmation, practitioners have reported a broader pattern touching clicks and the standard Search performance report as well. Search Engine Roundtable relayed a quote it attributed to Glenn Gabe on X: “Heads-up, I’m hearing from site owners about a weird drop in clicks starting around 8/12 in GSC that might be a bug. Visibility reporting is stable and analytics shows no drop.” A user on Google’s Search Central help forum, where the thread is flagged as trending, went further: “Not only Generative AI Features, but many people, including myself, have reported a significant drop in search results starting from the 13th.” Neither claim is confirmed by Google. Its anomaly entry covers one report and one metric, and says nothing about clicks or the standard report. Search Engine Land, which reported Google’s confirmation, summarized it the same way: “This is just a reporting issue, not a true issue in Google Search.”
The third logging error entry this year, and nothing inside GSC to check it against
This is the third logging-error entry on Google’s anomalies page in 2026, after a single-day Discover error on May 21 and a single-day Discover-plus-Generative-AI error on June 24. Both of those were dated to a single day. The August 13 entry is open-ended and is still marked ongoing. When we covered this report’s June launch, the limit worth flagging was that it ships exactly one metric, impressions, with no clicks, queries, or position to sanity-check it against. That gap is why a logging error and a genuine loss of AI visibility look identical inside the product itself: there is no second series in Search Console to tell them apart, which is exactly what sent Juan looking for an explanation before Mueller answered.
In practice, treat Generative AI report impressions dated August 13 onward as unreliable until Google closes this entry, and add your own note in whatever dashboard aggregates that data, since Google’s own annotation was still to come at the time of Mueller’s reply. Don’t let a third-party AI-visibility tool that ingests this same Search Console data read a mid-August dip as a citation loss on its own. And if your standard Search performance report also looks soft since around August 12, check it against GA4 organic sessions or server logs before drawing a conclusion, because Google’s confirmation does not extend to that report at all.
