Google Just Made Reporting Easier, Plus A Long-Awaited Look at AI Search Visibility

If you’ve ever felt like you needed three different tabs open just to understand how your business is actually performing online, you’re not alone. However, Google has just rolled out two updates that bring previously scattered data into one place.

Let’s take a look and what’s set to change.

Update One: Your Google Business Profile Data Now Lives Inside Google Analytics

For years, there’s been an annoying gap in local business reporting. Your Google Business Profile data like calls, direction requests, bookings, lived somewhere else entirely. If you wanted the full picture, you were stuck manually pulling numbers from two different dashboards and trying to make sense of them side by side.

However, as of June 2026, you can link your Google Business Profile directly to Google Analytics 4, and once connected, a dedicated section appears in your reports showing seven key metrics:

• Interactions
• Website clicks
• Calls
• Directions
• Messages
• Bookings
• Menus

Why This Is a Big Deal for Local Businesses

Previously, GA4 could only see Business Profile activity through UTM-tagged links, and that approach only ever captured website clicks. Every phone call someone made straight from your listing, every set of directions requested, every booking made directly through Google was completely invisible to your analytics.

For the first time, you can now see what happens when someone finds you on Google Search or Maps and takes action without ever visiting your website, sitting right alongside your normal site data.

For a restaurant in Puerto Banús, that means seeing how many people requested directions after searching “restaurants near me.” For a clinic in San Pedro, it means tracking how many calls came directly from your Business Profile rather than your contact page. For property agents, retailers, and service businesses across the Costa del Sol, it’s a much fuller view of how your local presence is actually driving enquiries.

A Few Things To Note

As with most “version one” features, there are some limitations to bear in mind:

• Six months of data only. GA4 won’t show anything older than six months, regardless of your reporting window. Useful for in-season tracking, but you won’t be doing year-on-year seasonal comparisons with this data just yet.
• No location-level breakdown. If you manage more than one profile, the metrics are combined across all of them. You’ll see total calls and directions, but not which location they came from. For multi-site businesses, this is a real limitation. You’ll still need the native Business Profile dashboard for that level of detail.
• Limited reporting flexibility. You can’t currently filter, segment, or use these metrics in GA4 Explorations or comparisons.

Update Two: Search Console Now Shows You AI Search Visibility

The second update addresses a question that’s been on everyone’s mind since AI Overviews started appearing in Google Search: is my content actually showing up in AI-generated results?

Until now, there was simply no easy way to answer that. On 3rd June 2026, Google launched dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports inside Search Console – a standalone section separate from your usual performance report, built specifically to show your visibility within AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover.

What You Can See

The new reports break down into five dimensions:

• Impressions: how often your URLs appeared inside AI-generated features
• Pages: which specific pages are surfacing in those AI results
• Countries: where in the world your AI visibility is strongest
• Devices: desktop versus mobile (for Search results)
• Dates: performance trends down to hourly granularity

No Click Data (Yet)

The new reports tell you whether your content is appearing in AI search, but not whether anyone is clicking through to your site afterwards. The reporting includes impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, but does not include click data.

This means we can measure visibility without yet being able to measure the impact of that visibility on traffic. It’s a good first step, but it’s not the complete picture, and Google has said it’s gathering feedback to decide what to add next.

Who Has Access Right Now

This is currently in a phased rollout, starting with a subset of website owners based in the UK, with global access expected to follow. If you don’t see it in your Search Console account yet, that simply means your site isn’t in the initial test group.

Why This Matters for Your Strategy

A blog post might be showing up regularly inside an AI Overview while underperforming in standard organic clicks, or vice versa. Being able to see that distinction changes how we think about content strategy.

It also means there’s now a much clearer way to demonstrate the value of strong, well-structured, genuinely helpful content (which is exactly what Google recommended in its recent AI optimisation guidance).

What Does This Mean for Your Business?

Reporting is getting better and visibility is becoming less of a guessing game.

• If you’re a local business with a single location, the Business Profile integration gives you a much fuller, faster way to see how your local presence drives real enquiries.
• If you’re focused on content and SEO, the new Search Console reports are an early but important step toward understanding how your content performs in an AI-first search world.
• If you’re managing multiple locations, it’s worth knowing the current limitations so you don’t build reporting expectations the tools can’t yet meet.

The businesses that benefit most from these updates will be the ones already doing the fundamentals well: a complete, accurate Google Business Profile, and content that’s useful to the people reading it.

We’ll Keep You Posted

At Peppermint, staying on top of changes like these is part of what we do every day for our clients across the Costa del Sol and beyond. If you’d like help setting up these integrations, making sense of your reporting, or simply want a second opinion on whether your local presence is working as hard as it should be, we’re here to help.