Is AI search free, and what actually costs money?

That makes technical eligibility a separate question from the price a person may encounter when using a particular AI-search service. Do not infer a public access price from Google's indexing rules or from the existence of a Search Console report.

The table keeps four different decisions from becoming one vague AI-search charge. The AI search hub gives the wider map of Search surfaces. A business can use a first-party report, pay for a separate monitoring service, do implementation itself, or hire outside help. Those choices are separate from whether a public AI feature has a user-facing price.

Google's Generative AI performance report includes AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google defines an impression there as a link to a site shown to a user in a generative-AI feature.² The report can group data by page, country, date, and device. It also excludes Search Labs experiments because those experiments are still in active development.²

The ordinary Search Console Performance report provides clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position, with dimensions such as Queries and Pages.⁴ Google's generative-AI report adds its documented view of links shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode.² These reports provide different views of Google Search activity, so do not combine them into one score without keeping the surface and definition visible.

If a business considers a monitoring service, ask four questions before treating its price as necessary:

1. Which AI engines and features does the service name?
2. Does it retain the exact prompt or query, location context, date, and displayed source?
3. Can the business export the underlying observations rather than only a summary score?
4. Does the service distinguish an AI source link, a local result, a Search Console impression, and a business outcome?

The documented baseline is ordinary Search eligibility. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible for a normal Search snippet to be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements or special optimizations.¹ The work a business chooses around that baseline can be done by an owner or an outside provider, but the Google sources do not publish a required task list, hourly rate, monthly benchmark, or guaranteed result.

1. Name the surface. Public feature use, a linked page in a Google AI feature, an ordinary Search click, and a customer action are different records.
2. Start with the first-party report that matches the record. Search Console's generative-AI report is for documented Google AI-feature impressions, while its ordinary Performance report covers broader Search metrics.^2,4
3. Price monitoring only after checking its surfaces, prompt or query records, location and date fields, source records, and export options.
4. Keep owner time or outside implementation in a separate budget line. Do not turn eligibility into a promise of an AI answer, ranking position, traffic, or customers.

This sequence gives a local business a usable cost decision without pretending that one AI-search price covers public access, measurement, monitoring, and implementation.