What Opting Out of Google's AI Search Features Means for Your Business

On 3rd june 2026, Google rolled out a Search Console setting that lets site owners pull their content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's AI features.

This is a control that did not exist before this year. UK regulators now require Google to offer it, and Google has started extending it to properties outside the UK.

It seems quite simple; include your content in Google's AI features or exclude it. In practice, the tradeoffs are harder to weigh, because Google's AI surfaces increasingly absorb features that used to stand on their own, including Top Stories carousels.

This piece breaks down what Search Console's control actually does, what led to it, how to use it, and what it means for your business right now.

About Google Search Console and What It Did Here

Search Console is Google's free tool for monitoring how a website performs in Search: indexing status, ranking queries, crawl errors, and now, AI feature participation. It has always let site owners manage visibility at a technical level through sitemaps, removal requests, and index coverage reports.

In 2026, Google added a new section to Search Console called "Search generative AI," placed under Settings.

According to Google's own help documentation, this control lets a property manage whether its content is eligible to appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's generative AI features. The default setting for every property is Include. Site owners have to actively switch to Exclude if they want out.

The rollout is not universal yet. Google has confirmed the setting is going out to a subset of website owners first, for testing, before wider release. Google also added a companion generative AI performance report inside Search Console, showing impressions from AI features by page, country, device, and date. Notably, this report does not include clicks or queries yet, only impressions.

Core Concepts of Opting Out

Three separate controls now exist for managing AI visibility, and understanding the difference matters more than the opt-out decision itself.

The Search generative AI control: This control is the new Search Console toggle. It governs whether your links and content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's AI features. It is a property-level setting, meaning it applies to your whole verified site, not individual pages.

Google-Extended: This token is an older robots.txt token. It controls whether crawled content trains future Gemini models and whether it can ground responses in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. According to Google's crawler documentation, Google Extended does not affect a site's inclusion in Search results and is not a ranking signal. It also has no bearing on AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Standard indexing controls: Robots.txt, noindex tags, and snippet directives predate all of these changes and still govern regular search visibility. Nosnippet, for example, removes a page from AI Overviews, but it also strips traditional snippets at the same time. It came at the cost of losing snippets everywhere.

Here is what the new toggle does not touch:

• It has no effect on rankings in standard Search results.
• It does not override Merchant Center or Google Ads participation, so Shopping listings stay a separate decision.
• It does not control AI model training, which still runs through Google Extended.

John Shehata, CEO of NewzDash, has stated publicly that using the opt-out will likely remove publishers from those embedded Top Stories placements too, since the toggle does not distinguish between AI-generated summaries and traditional features that happen to render inside an AI surface. Google has not confirmed this interpretation on the record.

How to Opt Out

Here is what it involves based on Google's documentation:

1. Open Search Console for the verified property you want to manage.
2. Go to Settings, then locate the section labeled Search generative AI.
3. Choose Exclude to remove your site's links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's generative AI features. Choose Include to keep the default, which allows your content to appear and ground AI responses.
4. For child properties, a third option, Inherit, tells the property to follow whatever setting the parent property uses.
5. Save the change. Google states it begins respecting updated settings on a rolling basis, generally within one to two days, though caching can delay full removal further.

There is no confirmation email or approval step. The setting takes effect on Google's schedule once submitted, and it can be reversed at any time by switching the toggle back to Include.

One limitation worth flagging before you touch it: this control only works at the property level today. Page-level controls, letting you exclude specific URLs instead of your whole site, are not due until March 2027 under the CMA's compliance timeline.

What It Means Now for Your Business

The generative AI performance report shows impressions only, with no clicks, no queries, and no conversion data attached.

Broader analytics can show organic referrals and on-site engagement, but nothing currently isolates AI-driven visits from a typical Search session. You are deciding whether to opt out of a channel you cannot yet measure with any precision.

That gap has produced real disagreement among practitioners.

Rahul Jain, CEO of Noble, has argued publicly that opting out will hurt most publishers more than it helps, since exclusion removes a business from where attention is concentrating rather than protecting it.

Academic researchers take a more skeptical view of the control's value altogether. In a paper published in the Journal of European Competition Law and Practice, the University of Oxford's Spencer Cohen and UCL's Todd Davies argued that an opt-out remedy does not meaningfully protect publisher business models or create real choice over how content gets used.

For most businesses, these questions decide whether opting out makes sense right now.

How much AI visibility do you actually have? Check the generative AI performance report first. If your impressions from AI features are minimal, the opt-out decision is not very significant either way.

Which control actually applies to your situation? If your concern is AI training data, Google-Extended is the relevant lever, not the Search Console toggle. If your concern is appearing in AI-generated answers specifically, the new control is correct. Confusing the two wastes effort on the wrong setting.

Conclusion

Google built a control that did not exist a year ago, and regulators imposed a timeline on it. That does not make the decision to use it any easier. The toggle is simple, the tradeoffs behind it are not, and the data needed to settle those tradeoffs is still six to twelve months away.

Treat this as a monitoring problem before it becomes a decision. Pull your generative AI performance report, confirm which control governs which surface, and flag whether Top Stories or Shopping exposure factors into your specific case.

Once click data and page-level controls arrive around March 2027, the opt-out choice will actually be measurable. Until then, staying included and watching the numbers is the lower-risk path for most businesses.