AI prompts: what your Search Console already shows

While sorting the long queries in the Search Console of our Webflow and AEO agency, we came across this one.

a person located in france is asking: best seo agencies in paris

Position 1.63. Zero clicks.

Nobody typed that into Google. It is an AI assistant searching on behalf of a user, and it forgot to clean up its query before sending it. Over sixteen months we recorded 31,011 impressions of this kind, for a single click.

In this article, we show the 4 prefixes to spot, the exact filter that surfaces them in thirty seconds, what it looks like on three other sites we manage, and what these numbers do not prove.

Why AI assistant prompts land in your Search Console

When you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend an agency, it does not know the answer. It goes looking for one.

It rewrites your request into a query, sends it to a search engine, reads the results and writes its answer. That intermediate query is not meant to be seen by anyone. Except it really does go to Google, so it generates impressions for the sites it surfaces.

Google does not separate them from the rest. Sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in overall traffic, inside the Web search type (source Google Search Central). There is no dedicated tab and no filter. These queries are buried in your usual report.

The 4 AI prompt prefixes to spot in your queries

From May 3, 2025 to August 26, 2026, four shapes keep coming back.

The first prefix is the most revealing. It shows the machine rewrote a human request and added the user's country before querying Google.

Position 1 to 3 on SEO agency buying prompts, and zero clicks

Ten variants of this prefix appear. All of them are looking for an SEO agency.

We are in the top three results on almost all of them. None produced a visit.

That is normal. The user never sees the results page, so they cannot click. Here, position does not measure an audience. It measures the odds of a machine reading us.

This lines up with a trend already measured. 68.01% of Google searches in the United States ended without a click over the first four months of 2026, against 60.45% in 2024 (source SparkToro). And the presence of an AI Overview cuts the click-through rate of the top position by 58%, against 34.5% measured in April 2025 (source Ahrefs). We covered this shift in our analysis of AI Overviews and zero-click search.

What a forgotten userlocation tag reveals about AI personalization

This query comes back 37 times, in position 1.

<userlocation>belgium</userlocation> <userlanguage>french</userlanguage> comment choisir entre site vitrine, site corporate et plateforme de services ?

An assistant passed Google the location and the language of its user as tags, without stripping them out.

We take two lessons from it. AI engines pass along a context the user never sees. And that context covers geography and language, not just the question itself.

A site seen as French-speaking and relevant to Belgium is therefore not served like a site seen as French. Almost nobody works on this variable today, including in the most advanced SEO and AEO strategies.

How to filter AI prompts in Search Console in 4 steps

No paid tool is needed.

You get every query of 55 characters and up. There are assistant prompts, monitoring-tool queries and genuinely long human searches. A few minutes of sorting is enough to separate the three.

The prefixes to look for first are a person located in, /overview, <user, <context> and is it. They will change. The principle will not.

What the same filter shows on 3 other Search Console properties

We ran the same filter on three other properties we manage.

On the B2B consulting site, a single query prefixed with is it accounts for 103 impressions at position 7.04.

The gap is clear and it tells you what to do. These queries only show up on sites producing comparative or informational content. A brochure site with clean markup but no editorial corpus does not enter the assistants' search field.

The limits of this analysis worth knowing

One click for 31,011 impressions. This is not a traffic channel and it will not become one.

The sample is a three-person agency in a narrow niche. Testing three other sites confirms the phenomenon exists, not how widespread it is.

Attribution stays indirect. Seeing an assistant's query does not tell you whether its final answer cited us or the competitor ranked right behind. Google passes along neither the name of the calling engine nor the text produced. That is exactly the problem we raised in our article on the ROI of AEO.

These prefixes will disappear. The day vendors clean up their queries, the signal goes dark. Nothing guarantees another one replaces it.

What we will do with this data in our monthly tracking

We are going to record these queries the way we record classic positions. They will enter no traffic report, but they answer the one question our clients ask. Do assistants find us when someone asks for what we do.

A one-off extract is useless. It is the monthly series that will show whether assistants are reading us more, or less. That is why we are going to build it into the Strategy and Data pillar of our monthly growth engagement.

This tracking completes what we were already publishing. Our AEO results gave the pipeline sourced from AI search. This one gives the measurement in between, the one that costs nothing and that almost nobody looks at.

To find out what your own Search Console holds on this subject, that is the first chapter of our AEO audit.

Frequently asked questions about AI prompts in Search Console

How do I know if AI prompts appear in my Search Console?

In the Performance report, add a filter on the Query dimension, choose Matches regex and enter .{55,}. You get queries of 55 characters and up. Then look for the prefixes a person located in, /overview, <user, <context> and is it.

Do these queries generate traffic?

No. Over sixteen months we counted 31,011 impressions for a single click. The user never sees the results page, so they cannot click. These queries measure exposure to machines, not an audience.

Does Google separate AI impressions in Search Console?

No. Sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in overall traffic, inside the Web search type. There is no dedicated tab or filter.

Why do these queries not appear on my site?

Across the 4 properties tested, only those publishing comparative or informational content surfaced any. The two brochure sites in the sample show zero, despite clean markup.

Should I pay for an AI visibility tracking tool?

Not for this particular diagnosis. The data is already in Search Console and the filter takes thirty seconds. A tool earns its place when you want to track the content of AI answers, not the queries feeding them.