What Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Cloudflare show about AI search, and what they do not (October 2026)
How your site is treated in AI search (AI Overviews, AI Mode, Copilot and others) is partly visible in official tools (some screens are free to read). This page puts three of them, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Cloudflare, into a table of what they show and what they do not, within what their official documentation says. What the documentation does not say, we say neither way.
Content checked: 15 October 2026
By tool: what is visible and what is not
| Tool | What it shows | What it does not show | Official documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console, "Generative AI performance" report | How many times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode (impressions), by page, country, date, device and search type. Google's documentation says the report includes data from the Web search type of the Performance report (Search results) | Clicks and queries are not in this report. Data from Search Labs experiments is not included either. It does not tell which question led to an impression, or which AI app's answer it was | https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139 |
| Google Search Console, "Search generative AI" setting | The setting: include your site's links and content in Search generative AI features, exclude them, or inherit from the parent property. The default is include, and the default for a child property is inherit. A change may take 1 to 2 days to apply | It produces no numbers. Google's documentation says this control does not change use for AI model training. Its effect on the Gemini app is not covered by this documentation | https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16908024 |
| Bing Webmaster Tools, "AI Performance" (public preview) | How many times your pages were cited in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations (Total Citations), the average number of cited pages per day (Average Cited Pages), the phrases used when retrieving cited content (grounding queries), and citations per URL | The data is "a sample of overall citation activity". The numbers show how often pages are cited, not page importance, ranking or placement. The partner integrations are not named. The announcement does not say whether there is an API | https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2026/2/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview/ |
| Bing Webmaster Tools, "AI Performance" Topics Portfolio (beta, announced 13 October 2026) | Grounding queries grouped into topics, and the queries where other sites are cited but yours is not (Top Opportunity Queries) | It only appears "if there is sufficient data for your site". A new site may see nothing | https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2026/10/introducing-topics-portfolio-beta-in-ai-performance/ |
| Bing Webmaster API (URL information) | Per-URL fields such as the last crawled date (LastCrawledDate) and the discovery date (DiscoveryDate) | We found no field in the documented API saying a URL has been indexed. When we checked on pw.migurei.ai, HttpStatus and DocumentSize were 0 even for crawled pages (the API may simply not fill them) | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.bing.webmaster.api.interfaces.urlinfo |
| Cloudflare AI Crawl Control, "Most popular paths" | A table of the paths AI crawlers request most (path, hostname, allowed requests, referrals). It can be filtered by crawler, and crawlers are grouped by operator | Which user's question made which bot come is not a column of the table. According to the documentation, referrals are on paid plans only. Nor does the table tell you what an AI app put in its answer | https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/features/analyze-ai-traffic/ |
- The table rests on the official documentation read on 13 to 15 October 2026 and on records in our knowledge base. The documentation may change.
- We do not assess the price of any tool here. We confirmed that the Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools screens above can be read for free; for Cloudflare we confirmed no plan condition beyond referrals being on paid plans only.
What pw measures in addition
Parallel World (pw) uses its own site, pw.migurei.ai, to run "Runs" in which a fixed question is put to an AI app, and matches the bot requests left in the server access log to a Run by time and Run identifier. So it records which bot fetched which page during which question window (whether the question caused it cannot be told), on our own site only.
Example: in a Perplexity Run at 10:05 UTC on 12 October 2026, Perplexity-User did not fetch the page on our site that time, but 16 to 17 seconds later PerplexityBot, from an IP address Perplexity publishes, fetched /robots.txt and the home page. The match was marked "shared" (it overlaps in time with other Runs), so our counts do not include it. Being close in time does not prove the question caused it.
This is an observation on our own site, not numbers for your site, and it does not replace the free tools. The tools in the table above show numbers the operators themselves aggregate (Bing: a sample).
What this page cannot say, and its limits
- The table rests on each operator's official documentation and on our knowledge-base records. We did not actually operate each screen on any site other than pw.migurei.ai.
- Where the documentation is silent we do not say "cannot". "What it does not show" means there is no item for it in the documentation, or what the documentation states.
- Bing's AI Performance is a public preview and shows a sample. What "select partner integrations" means is not known.
- On a new site, some features show nothing when data is thin, as with Bing's Topics Portfolio. We have not checked these numbers for pw.migurei.ai and do not publish them here.
- This page does not rank the tools or say which one to use.
- Our log matching is an observation on one site. It cannot tell whether the question caused a bot's visit or the two merely overlapped in time.