Google has quietly put AI inside two free tools you already have
There is a lot of money being charged at the moment for AI tools that analyse your website performance.
Meanwhile Google has quietly added AI to Google Analytics and Search Console, both of which you already have, and both of which are free. Hardly anybody has noticed, and the businesses I speak to almost never use them.
They are genuinely useful, particularly if you have always found these tools slightly baffling. But they do two very different jobs, and knowing which is which will save you an evening of frustration.
The important distinction
Google Analytics has an AI that analyses. You ask it a question about your data and it answers, with charts, explanations and sometimes recommendations.
Search Console has an AI that configures. You describe the report you want in plain English and it sets up the filters, date ranges and comparisons for you. Then you read the report yourself.
That second one matters. Search Console’s AI will not tell you what your data means. It builds the view, you draw the conclusions. Anyone implying otherwise has not used it.
Both are useful. They are just not the same thing.
Google Analytics: the one that actually talks back
In GA4, look for the sparkle icon in the top right corner. It is called Analytics Advisor, or Ask Advisor depending on when your account got updated, and it is Gemini sitting inside your property with access to your numbers.
It works best with specific questions rather than vague ones. Here are some worth trying.
To get your bearings, if you have never really understood your own analytics:
“In plain English, who visits my website? What are their top demographics, where are they from, and what devices do they use?”
To find out what is actually working:
“Which pages on my site get the most engaged visitors, and which pages do people leave quickly? Explain what that suggests.”
To understand a change you have noticed:
“Why did my traffic drop last month compared to the month before? What were the main contributing factors?”
That last type is the strongest feature. It does proper root cause analysis rather than just reporting the number, which is the thing that used to take an analyst an afternoon.
To find the gap between traffic and enquiries:
“Which pages bring in the most visitors but produce the fewest contact form submissions or phone clicks?”
And the broad one, which is surprisingly good:
“Looking at the last three months, what are the most interesting patterns in my data, and what are my biggest strengths and weaknesses?”
One genuinely new thing worth asking, because Google added it in May and most people have not caught up:
“How much of my traffic is coming from AI assistants, and which pages are they landing on?”
GA4 now separates traffic from recognised AI assistants including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude into its own channel. Until this year that traffic was scattered across referral and other. If you have been wondering whether any of this AI business is real for your business, that is where you find out.
Search Console: the one that builds the view
In Search Console, go to your Performance report and look for the AI configuration option. Type what you want in plain English and it sets the report up.
Prompts that work well:
“Show me queries with high impressions but low click through rate over the last 90 days”
That one is the most valuable thing in this post. Those are searches where you are appearing but nobody is clicking, which usually means your title or description is not doing its job. It is the cheapest improvement available on most websites.
“Show me queries where I rank between position 5 and 15”
The near misses. You are on page one or just off it, and a modest improvement puts you in the range where people actually click. Far easier than starting from nothing.
“Compare my mobile and desktop performance over the last six months”
“Which pages gained the most clicks in the last three months compared to the previous three?”
“Show me queries containing cost, price or how much”
That last one is worth running. Those are people close to buying, and if you are appearing for cost questions without a page that answers them, that is a page worth writing.
Then do the reading yourself. The AI has built you a table. What it means, and what you do about it, is still your job.
What to actually do with the near misses
Since I have sent you looking for them, here is what they are for.
A query sitting at position seven or eight is telling you something specific: Google already thinks you are relevant, it just does not think you are the best answer yet. That is a much easier problem than not appearing at all.
So take the ones that genuinely matter to your business, ignore the noise, and ask whether the page they belong to actually answers that question properly. Usually it half does. The phrase appears somewhere in the middle, the page is mostly about something else, and the title says something different.
Fix that. Put the phrase in the title, answer that question near the top of the page, and give it its own section rather than a passing mention. If the query is important enough and no page really covers it, write one.
None of that is clever. It is just aiming a page at a question it was already nearly answering.
The honest limits
Two things worth saying, because I do not want you to be disappointed.
These tools describe, they do not decide. They will tell you what happened and sometimes why. They will not tell you whether the customers you got were any good, whether the enquiries turned into work, or whether the thing you are doing is the right thing to be doing at all. That is judgement, and it is still yours.
And they only see what they can measure. Neither knows about the job that came from someone seeing your van, or the recommendation in a Facebook group, or the customer who found you through an AI and never touched your website. Plenty of what works for a local business happens outside these two dashboards.
Use them for what they are good at: seeing what is actually happening rather than guessing, and spotting the near misses that are cheap to fix.
Why I am telling you this
Because a fair amount of what gets sold as AI-powered SEO reporting is a wrapper around exactly this data, which you already have, for free, with an AI attached to it.
That does not make every tool a rip-off. There are genuine reasons to pay for software, particularly if you need to track things Google will not show you. But you should know what you already own before you buy something to replace it.
Spend twenty minutes with these two before you spend anything else. You will learn more about your own website than most reports will tell you.
Want someone to go through what your data is actually saying? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.