Search Console now separates AI traffic from everything else.
Over the past few weeks Google has been rolling out a "Generative AI" option under Search Appearance in the Performance report, splitting out impressions and clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode. It's arriving account by account, so check your client properties individually rather than assuming.
Two things follow from this: a conversation you need to have, and a service you can now sell properly.
Have the conversation first
The pattern on most client properties will be healthy impressions and a lower click-through rate than classic results. Some clients will read that as decline. A few will read it as your fault.
Get ahead of it. Before the next reporting cycle, send a short note explaining that a mention inside an AI answer is a different unit than a click, and that the people who do click through tend to arrive further along in their decision. Frame it as a change in what the channel does, not a loss.
The agencies that lose accounts over the next year won't be the ones whose numbers moved. They'll be the ones whose clients found the movement first and got no explanation.
Turning it into a line item
What the report gives you is something you didn't have before: a number the client can see in their own account. That makes AI visibility work concrete enough to price.
A shape that works:
Baseline audit (one-off): where the client currently appears in Google's generative results, plus what the major assistants actually say when asked their category question. Delivered as a page of findings and fixes, not a data export.
Answer rewrites (project): first-paragraph rewrites, spec and pricing tables, service-area pages, comparison content. Production work that templates well after your first two or three clients.
Monthly AI visibility reporting (retainer add-on): the Search Console breakdown alongside assistant checks, tracked over time.
The audit sells the project. The project justifies the retainer.
Where the margin actually sits
The audit is the part that eats hours if you do it by hand — asking assistants the right questions, recording who got named, working out why the competitor did. That's the step to systematise or tool, because the rewrite work is billable and pleasant, and the monthly reporting is close to automatic once it's set up.
Price the audit as a diagnostic rather than as time. Clients accept that from a surveyor or a mechanic, and they'll accept it here.
Two cautions
Don't promise placement inside AI answers. Nobody can deliver that, and the first client who holds you to it will cost you more than the deal was worth. Promise a clear picture and specific, defensible improvements — then be loud about the ones that landed.
And don't let Search Console become the whole story. It reports Google only. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot send nothing back, and in plenty of client categories they're already a meaningful share of first contact. A report built on Google data alone will look thinner every quarter.
SimpleAIO covers the assistant side — the same questions your clients' customers are asking, with findings in language you can put straight in front of a client. Agency accounts run multiple properties from one dashboard.
If you're building the audit product this quarter, that's the piece you don't have to build yourself.