Google Lets Sites Opt Out of AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google will let website owners opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode through a new toggle in Search Console, the company said on June 3. Sites that switch it off lose all traffic and impressions from those AI features but keep their normal place in regular Google Search results, and Google says the choice will not be used as a ranking signal.

The switch is rolling out to a subset of UK website owners first, the result of an order from Britain’s competition regulator. It arrives well after AI-generated answers started cutting into the traffic publishers rely on.

How the New Search Console Toggle Works

Google’s announcement of new controls and insights for website owners presents the change as a single switch inside Search Console, the free dashboard most site owners already use to track how they show up in search. The control decides whether a site’s pages can appear in, and help ground, Google’s generative AI search features.

Flip it off and a site drops out of three surfaces:

• AI Overviews, the AI summaries that sit at the top of many results pages
• AI Mode, Google’s full chatbot-style search experience
• AI Overviews inside Google Discover, the personalised feed on mobile

A site that opts out keeps showing up in standard search results and the regular Discover feed. Google is blunt that the toggle won’t feed into rankings, an answer to the long-running worry that blocking AI use would quietly drag a site down the page. The company is also adding generative-AI data to Search Console: impression counts, which pages turn up in AI answers, and the countries where they appear.

Until now the tools publishers had were crude. The nosnippet tag or a blocked crawler also stripped a site out of normal search or rich snippets, so the only way to refuse AI was to refuse most of Google. This toggle splits the two apart for the first time.

The CMA Order That Forced Google’s Hand

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA, the UK’s competition regulator) designated Google with strategic market status (SMS, a formal finding of entrenched and substantial market power) in general search back in October 2025, citing the company’s control of more than 90% of UK search queries. On June 3 the regulator turned that label into action, publishing its first set of binding conduct requirements under Britain’s new digital markets regime.

The chain of events ran like this:

1. October 2025: the CMA designates Google with SMS in general search services.
2. Early 2026: the regulator consults publishers and Google on a draft set of conduct requirements.
3. June 3, 2026: the CMA finalises the rules and gives Google nine months to comply, with parts expected sooner.

In a world first, publishers will be able to opt out of their content being used to power AI features in Google search.

That line comes from the regulator’s June 3 statement, announced by Sarah Cardell, the CMA’s chief executive. The package goes wider than the opt-out itself. Under the CMA order on Google search services, Google must attribute publisher content with clear links in AI answers, must let publishers separately opt out of having their work used to fine-tune AI models, and must file compliance reports every six months for the first year.

Traffic Was Already Bleeding Before the Toggle

The control matters because the damage it addresses has already happened. Publishers spent the past year watching AI answers absorb the clicks that used to land on their pages, and the numbers are stark.

• 33%: the year-on-year fall in global Google search referrals to news sites in the 12 months to November 2025, per the Reuters Institute’s 2026 industry survey of 280 media leaders.
• 58%: the drop in click-throughs for top-ranking pages where AI Overviews appear, in an Ahrefs study published in February 2026.
• More than 40%: the search-traffic decline publishers expect over the next three years, with a fifth of them bracing for losses above 75%.
• 2.5 billion: the monthly active users Google now claims for AI Overviews, against more than a billion for AI Mode.

Some readers are routing around AI answers on their own. Visits to DuckDuckGo’s no-AI search page more than tripled after Google’s May developer conference rebuilt its search box around AI. UK trade bodies pushed hard during the consultation: the News Media Association documented a 19% slide in click-throughs to reference services and asked the regulator to cut Google’s implementation window from six months to three, while the Publishers Association called for a clean split between Google’s search crawler and its AI crawler.

Why the Opt-Out Is a No-Win Switch for Publishers

Here is the catch buried in the good news. A publisher that flips the switch off walks away from a surface reaching billions of people. There is no middle setting. You cannot keep earning AI impressions while refusing to ground answers, and you cannot charge Google to appear. The choice is feed the system that is eroding your clicks, or disappear from the fastest-growing slice of search.

That makes the toggle far less useful in practice than it looks on a press release. Most large publishers will stay in and hope the new attribution links claw back some traffic, because the alternative is voluntary invisibility. Smaller sites that live or die on long-tail queries have even less room to gamble. The control answers the question publishers were asking, yet the economics of using it barely changed.

And measuring the cost of opting out is close to impossible. Search Console will now show how often a site appears in AI answers, but not how many clicks a page lost because a user read the summary and never scrolled. Without that figure, the decision to switch off rests on guesswork about traffic a publisher can’t see.

What the Toggle Leaves Untouched

The opt-out is narrower than the headline suggests. It governs Google’s search-side AI products and nothing else, and a separate control handles model training. The table below sorts what a UK site can and can’t shut off with the new switch.

The Gemini gap is the one that will sting. Google’s Gemini app, where the company is pushing assistants like the Gemini Spark personal agent, falls entirely outside the toggle, so opting out of search-side AI does nothing to stop content surfacing in the chatbot. The CMA’s wider remit does reach further, covering fine-tuning and broader generative services, which is why Google has to offer that second, separate opt-out. The technical detail of how those crawler and training controls interact sits in Google’s guidance on generative AI content.

For now the switch exists only for a slice of UK site owners, and Google has nine months to roll the full set of controls out, with parts due sooner. The rest of the web waits to see when, and whether, the same switch reaches it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I opt out of AI Overviews without losing my Google ranking?

Yes. Google says the Search Console toggle will not be used as a ranking signal. Opting out removes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover, but its position in regular Google Search results is unaffected.

Where is the opt-out toggle located?

Inside Search Console, Google’s free dashboard for site owners. It is rolling out first to a subset of website owners in the United Kingdom for testing before any wider release.

Does opting out stop Google’s Gemini app from using my content?

No. The toggle only covers Google’s search-side AI features. The Gemini app is excluded. The CMA separately requires Google to let publishers opt out of having their content used to fine-tune AI models, which is a different control.

Will I still get traffic if I stay in AI Overviews?

Probably less than before. Independent studies have measured steep click declines on pages where AI summaries appear. Google is now required by the CMA to attribute publisher content with clear links in AI answers, which may recover some of those clicks.

When does this apply outside the UK?

Google has nine months under the CMA order to implement the full set of controls and says important parts will arrive before that deadline. A global rollout is expected to follow the UK testing, though Google has not committed to a date.