On 3 June the Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to give publishers detailed metrics on user engagement with their content inside generative AI features. Google announced its new performance report the same day. The rulebook, Google wrote itself. The scoreboard took a regulator.

The generative AI performance report shows impressions, pages, countries and devices across AI Overviews and AI Mode. It does not show clicks. Bing’s equivalent report skips them too, and trade coverage isn’t holding its breath for either company to add them. A brand can now prove it was cited and still not know whether the citation sent one visitor.

Measurement starts on 18 May, with no backfill, and the report is reaching a subset of UK site owners before anyone else. A retailer wanting to know what AI answers cost it in traffic would need a period from before they existed. There isn’t one. The record begins when the party being measured began keeping it.

The regulator asked for more than Google delivered. Its final decision specifies performance data showing “the number of ‘Impressions’, ‘Clicks’, and the ‘Click-Through Rate’”, disaggregated from Google Search as a whole, and records that the CMA has “not made any changes to the level of information we expect Google to provide”. One of the three shipped in June. The requirement takes effect in December.

An impression proves you appeared; only a click proves that appearing was worth anything.

Asked for better data, Google recommended itself. It told the CMA that publishers can already assess referral quality through “existing Google Search Console data and on-site analytics”, so no click-quality metric was needed. The regulator disagreed, finding that what Google provides is not sufficient for publishers to judge what the traffic is worth.

The optimization guide is emphatic that nothing has changed: SEO best practice still applies because the AI features run on Google’s existing ranking and quality systems — a stance trade press has shorthanded to “still SEO”. llms.txt is ignored; content need not be chunked; no special markup is required. Every instruction points back to the practices Google already rewards.

Retailers inherit this settlement without the leverage that produced it. The opt-out control Google began honouring on 17 June lets a site withhold itself from AI answers, and it strengthens a publisher’s hand because a newspaper can afford to make the threat. A fashion label cannot. Invisibility is not a negotiating position when discovery is the business. The remedy was built for parties who can walk away, then handed to an industry that cannot.

Google says more is coming. It has told trade press it will “introduce additional metrics over time.” A promise is not a scorer.

Earlier today we reported which beauty brands the models cite most, and why the winner was settled in 2016. That contest now has a scoreboard, and the company that keeps it also wrote the training manual. The advice may well be sound. There is simply no second scorer to check it against.