There is now a setting in Google Search Console called Search generative AI. It lives under Settings. It has two positions, Include and Exclude, and it takes one to two days to take effect.
Set it to Exclude and your site stops appearing in AI Overviews, in AI Mode, and in the generative features of Discover. Your pages keep ranking in regular blue-link Search exactly as before. Google’s documentation is explicit that the control “affects only whether content can appear in certain Search generative AI features,” and that it “is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal that affects other parts of Search.”
For twenty-five years there was no such switch, because there was nothing to switch off. This is the first time a website can decline to feed Google’s answers while remaining inside Google’s index.
Almost nobody is going to touch it. Understanding why requires looking at three things Google did not build.
Google Did Not Choose to Build This
The toggle is a compliance artifact. In October 2025 the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority designated Google as holding Strategic Market Status in general search — a finding that the company handles more than 90% of UK searches, and one that lets the regulator impose binding conduct requirements without first proving anticompetitive behaviour. The CMA was careful to note that designation “does not imply that it has acted anti-competitively.”
On 3 June 2026, the CMA published its final decision. Google must let publishers stop their content powering AI features. It must attribute publisher content with clear links. And — separately, which matters — it must let publishers opt out of having their content used to fine-tune AI models.
Google was given a phased calendar rather than a single date: the main publisher controls by 3 December 2026, page-level controls by 3 March 2027 — the outer nine-month deadline. The company must file compliance reports every six months for the first year, with data supporting whatever it claims. Testing began the same day the decision landed. Google published the Search Console documentation around 20 July 2026 and started rolling the control out to a subset of site owners.
The obligation is UK law and binds Google’s UK search services. The implementation is a Search Console setting, described in Google’s own documentation in general terms rather than as a UK-only feature — one of several details publishers elsewhere are still working out for themselves.
The reaction from the trade body representing American news publishers was pointed about the causation.
The Number That Makes the Exit Tempting
Ahrefs pulled Google Search Console data across 300,000 keywords and compared click-through rates from December 2023, before AI Overviews, to December 2025. Top-ranking pages showed a 58% lower average click-through rate when an AI Overview was present. Eight months earlier the same measurement had come in at 34.5%, so the effect is not merely large, it is accelerating. Position two lost roughly half its clicks. Even position ten dropped by nearly 20%.
Pew Research went at it behaviourally, tracking 68,879 real Google searches. With an AI Overview on the page, users clicked a traditional result 8% of the time. Without one, 15%. And the number that publishers keep repeating to each other: readers clicked a source link inside the AI Overview 1% of the time.
Those are lab-clean measurements. The business numbers are messier and worse. Press Gazette’s analysis of major publishers found global Google referral traffic down roughly 33% in the year to November 2025, with traditional news outlets in the 26–55% range. Digital Content Next reported most member publishers losing between 1% and 25%, and some more than 75%. People Inc. counted 800 million lost visits from Google between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2026.
Set against that, an Exclude button looks like leverage. It is not, and the reasons are structural.
Three Things Google Did Not Build
First: the data to make the decision. A publisher weighing this needs to know how many clicks currently arrive because of an AI Overview citation versus in spite of one. Google reports impressions. It does not break out AI-specific click-through data. Phil Andraos, general manager of Reuters Digital, put it flatly: “There’s not enough data.” If the reporting existed, he said, decisions could happen quickly. The CMA has separately required Google to publish disaggregated engagement metrics — impressions, click-throughs and CTR — through Search Console, which is arguably the more consequential half of the remedy and has not landed yet.
Second: separate switches. AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s generative features are three very different bets sharing one control. AI Overviews reach more than 2.5 billion users a month and demonstrably cannibalise clicks. AI Mode reaches over a billion. Discover, for a great many publishers, is now a primary traffic source that they cannot afford to lose under any circumstances. Chris Dicker, CEO of Candr Media Group, named the fear precisely: that Google “could eventually bundle Discover into the same framework, knowing full well that many publishers now rely on Discover as a major source of traffic and therefore cannot realistically opt out.”
Third: an opt-in. The default is Include. Every site on the web is already feeding AI answers and will continue to unless it acts. Stuart Forrest, formerly global audience development director at Bauer Media Group, identified what that inversion costs publishers at the negotiating table: “If this were opt-in, Google would have to prove to us why we should let them use our content.”
Bannister called the opt-out “nonsensical” for publishers. Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, raised the objection that no toggle can address: the remedy governs future use only, and does nothing about the volume of protected content already ingested.
What the Switch Does and Does Not Do
| If you set it to Exclude | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| AI Overviews | Your content stops appearing. Other sites still do, and Google can still answer the same question from them |
| AI Mode | Same exclusion — no separate control |
| Discover generative features | Same exclusion — no separate control |
| Regular Google Search | Unaffected. Google states the setting is not a ranking or inclusion signal |
| Crawling | Continues. This is a display control, not an access control — robots.txt remains the tool for that |
| Query interpretation | Google can still use your pages to understand language and queries |
| Merchant Center and Google Ads | Unaffected |
| Individual URLs | Not yet. Property-wide only until page-level controls arrive, due 3 March 2027 |
| Propagation | 1–2 days |
| Other AI companies | Nothing. This is a Google setting and binds only Google |
Google’s Account of It
Google has consistently framed the delay as technical rather than commercial. Speaking at the FT Strategies News in the Digital Age conference in London on 11 February 2026, Sulina Connal, the company’s managing director for news and books partnerships in Europe, described the build this way: “Because AI is integral to how search works, implementing the new controls is a complex engineering, huge engineering project, and we have been highly intentional in our approach.” The stated design goal was “simple, scalable tools that you can use to manage your content.”
The claim is defensible on its face. If generative answers are woven through ranking and retrieval rather than sitting on top of them, then excluding a domain from the answer while preserving its ranking really is architectural surgery. The rejoinder, which surfaced immediately, is that a company committing tens of thousands of engineers and hundreds of billions of dollars to AI infrastructure is making a choice when it describes a per-domain exclusion flag as hard.
Note also what “simple and scalable” produced: one switch, three surfaces, property-wide, defaulted on. Every simplification in that list happens to favour inclusion.
What to Take From This
- The control is real and it is worth having. Six months ago the honest answer to “can I keep my journalism out of AI Overviews without leaving Google?” was no. It is now yes. That is a genuine change, and it happened because one regulator with a designation power asked for it.
- The missing click data is the actual story. An option you cannot price is not a choice. Whether Google ships disaggregated AI click-through reporting before the December milestone determines whether this remedy has teeth or is decoration.
- Bundling is the mechanism that neutralises it. Attaching a surface publishers depend on to surfaces that are cannibalising them makes the switch unusable without ever refusing anything. Watch what else gets attached to it.
- March 2027 is the date that matters more than this one. Page-level control is what turns an all-or-nothing lever into an editorial policy — hold back investigations and exclusives, let commodity coverage feed the machine.
- One national regulator now sets defaults for the web. The CMA acted; every publisher watching a Search Console setting appear is downstream of a UK decision. Neither Washington nor Brussels has produced an equivalent lever on this specific question.
The Takeaway
The publishing industry spent two years asking Google for a way out of AI search. It has one now. The response from the people who asked for it has ranged from “cautiously optimistic” to “nonsensical,” which is what happens when a demand is met in its narrowest possible form.
The arithmetic facing an editor is brutal and incomplete in the same breath. Staying in costs 58% of clicks on your best-ranked pages, and a 1-in-100 chance that a reader who sees your work cited actually visits you. Walking out costs an unknown number, because the one party who can measure it has not published it — and the walk-out is all-or-nothing across three products, one of which many publishers cannot survive losing.
So the toggle sits there, set to Include, on nearly every property on the web. That is not a market outcome. It is a default, engineered to survive a remedy, and it will hold until either the click data appears or someone forces a price on the content itself.