How to Report AIO Results to Your Manager: Monthly Report Items

A monthly AI search optimization report should list Google impressions, citations in AI answers, website visits and inquiries or purchases as separate numbers. If you combine all four into “AI results”, you cannot see what is growing and what has stalled.

As an illustration, imagine a marketer two months into AI search optimization. Their manager asks, “So, is it working?” This article shows which monthly report items to include and how to write the report.

Metrics to Separate in an AIO Report: Impressions, Citations, Visits and Outcomes

Split reported numbers into impressions, citations, visits and outcomes. Each uses different tools and units.

Metric	What it counts	Main source	Unit
Impressions	Times your pages appeared in Google Search AI features	Search Console generative AI report [1]	Count
Citations	Share of AI answers to your chosen questions that linked to your pages	Your AI citation tracking records (Bing Citation Share is a separate metric with a different denominator; see below) [3]	X of Y, %
Visits	Visits from AI services	GA4 Traffic acquisition report [4]	Sessions
Outcomes	Inquiries, purchases and so on	GA4 key events, your sales records [4]	Count, revenue

The four look like a chain from top to bottom. But more impressions do not always mean more visits. Even when cited, some people get their answer and never open the link. That is why you report them separately.

Monthly Report Items and Where to Get Them

For each item, write its source and what that number cannot tell you. Adding what is unknown helps your manager avoid misreading the numbers.

Item	Source	What this number cannot tell you
Impressions in AI features and top pages	Search Console generative AI report	Whether people noticed or clicked the link
Citation rate on chosen questions (by AI)	AI citation tracking records	Citations for questions outside your list
Citation Share in Bing and Copilot	Bing Webmaster Tools	Competitor names, rankings, visits
Visits from AI services	GA4 Traffic acquisition	Visits with no referrer recorded
Inquiries and purchases	GA4 key events, sales records	How much AI contributed to the purchase

What the Search Console Generative AI Report Shows

It shows how often your pages appeared in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. As of August 31, 2026, the reports were rolled out to all websites worldwide [1]. Discover has its own separate report, and the device breakdown is available for Search results only [1].

The help page defines impressions as how many times links to your site were shown in a generative AI feature. You can see impression trends, top pages and breakdowns by country and device [2]. In the help page checked on September 23, 2026, the metric described is impressions; clicks and query lists are not described.

Three points matter for reporting. The report may not appear if your site has too few impressions in AI features. Search Labs experiments are not included. In exported data, values shown as “~” or “-” become zeros [2]. Before reporting a month as “zero impressions”, check the screen as well.

AI feature impressions are also included in the overall search Performance report [5]. Do not add the two numbers together.

Cautions When Reporting Bing’s Citation Share

Citation Share is the percentage of all citations shown for a specific grounding query that point to your site. It differs from a citation rate based on answer counts, and it is not a ranking or traffic share.

On June 16, 2026, Microsoft released Citation Share in preview as a new Bing Webmaster Tools feature. It describes it as an observational metric, not a ranking system or competitive scoreboard, and notes that it does not expose competitor domains [3].

In your report, call it “our share of citations in Bing” and note that it is a preview metric.

Writing a Report Your Manager Will Understand

Write in the order “what we changed → which numbers moved → what we’ll do next”. Include the change date and the comparison period.

The numbers below are fictional and for illustration only.

Before:

Our AI efforts are working. AI impressions grew 1.5 times.

After:

On September 5 we added “additional fee conditions” to the pricing page. In Search Console’s generative AI report, September impressions were 1,200, up from 800 in August. For our 10 chosen questions, run 3 times each, ChatGPT citations rose from 6 to 9 out of 30 runs. AI referral visits were flat at 40 a month, with 2 inquiries. In October, we will revise the top of the pricing page, which gets the most impressions, to understand why visits have not increased.

The revised version shows what changed, where the numbers came from, the comparison period and the next task. Stating plainly that visits did not increase gives your manager something to decide on.

What Not to Claim in Your Report

Do not claim that rising citations or impressions caused higher sales. A before-and-after comparison alone cannot establish the cause.

Avoid	Say instead
AI optimization increased sales	In the same period, 2 inquiries came from AI referral visits
Our citation rate is the industry’s best	For our 10 chosen questions, we were linked in 9 of 30 runs
We beat competitors on Citation Share	Our share of citations in Bing rose
Our efforts doubled impressions	Impressions rose after the update; seasonal or search changes may also play a part

Also avoid writing “we now get cited in ChatGPT” based on a single answer. AI answers vary even for the same question, so report results as X out of Y.

Google does not guarantee inclusion in AI features either [5]. If you report months when numbers fall in the same format, you can later tell whether a change was temporary or a trend.

To see AI visits in GA4, open Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition and look for AI services in the session source [4]. Visits with no referrer recorded will not appear there.

For how to record answers, see What Is LLMO?. For checking citation rates in AgentSignal, see How to Use AI Optimization.