Google is rolling out a Search Console setting that lets you pull your content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s AI features without leaving Search. That’s a choice we haven’t had before, and regulators in the UK now require Google to offer it.
Whether to use it is a harder question than it seems because the tradeoffs keep stacking up. Tracking data released this week by NewzDash, which sells news-visibility tracking to publishers, found Top Stories carousels rendering inside AI Overviews on U.S. trending news results. That means opting out of AI could mean opting out of Top Stories.
Here’s what the new Search Console setting does, how it got here, and what’s worth knowing before you touch it.
What The Control Covers
The Search generative AI control lives under Settings in Search Console. Google is rolling it out to a subset of website owners, so not every account has it yet. The default option to include your website lets content appear as links and helps ground AI responses in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s generative AI features, with whatever impressions and traffic that brings. Excluding your site removes it from those features, links included.
Google said it would begin respecting these changes on June 17. Changes generally take a few days to process, then content should drop out within one to two days, though caching can delay it.
The setting isn’t a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search, so using it shouldn’t affect regular results. It doesn’t override separate choices in Merchant Center or Google Ads, so Shopping participation stays its own decision. And it doesn’t touch AI training, which runs through a different control.
The choice began appearing on accounts outside the UK in July. Jamie Indigo, Director of Technical SEO at Cox Automotive, flagged the setting on a U.S. account on LinkedIn: “Search generative AI controls in Google Search Console. I’m not even British and it’s not even my birthday!”
How The Opt-Out Choice Took Shape
Until this year, there was no way to keep a page out of Google’s AI features without keeping it out of Search.
Robots.txt, noindex, and snippet directives have been around long before AI Overviews. None of these tools specifically separate generative features from others.
For example, Nosnippet removes content from AI Overviews, but it also takes out traditional snippets at the same time. This all-or-nothing approach was something Google acknowledged in January, when it mentioned it was exploring ways to opt out of AI features.
Google-Extended has addressed some of this issue. The robots.txt token controls whether crawled content can be used for training future Gemini models that power Gemini Apps and the Vertex AI API for Gemini, and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. It didn’t control whether content could appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google’s crawler docs say Google-Extended doesn’t affect a site’s inclusion in Search and isn’t a ranking signal.
The Search Console setting offers a different choice by removing a site from Google’s AI features and nothing else. It was born through a regulator and a product team working on the same problem at once.
Google made a statement in January that landed the same day the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opened a consultation on requiring AI opt-outs. In June, the CMA imposed a conduct requirement requiring Google to give websites more control over how their content is used in generative AI, and Google began testing the toggle with UK properties the same week. In the UK, this requirement makes the control obligations mandatory, with deadlines extending into next year.
When Traditional Features Sit Inside AI Surfaces
Google’s setting treats AI features and regular results as separate things. The issue with that is Google’s results don’t always separate AI and organic results. When a Top Stories carousel from organic search renders inside an AI Overview, one toggle may control both.
John Shehata, CEO and founder of NewzDash and GDdash, put a number on it: “Nearly 1 in 6 U.S. trending news queries now place Top Stories inside AI Overviews.” The 15.5% rate applies to tracked results where Google displayed Top Stories, not to all queries NewzDash tracked. The UK figure is 17.46%.
Additionally, he found the embedded carousel and the standalone version didn’t appear together. NewzDash hasn’t published sample sizes or collection dates alongside the figures.
Kyle Sutton, Head of SEO and AI Discovery at The Washington Post, sees the same pattern anecdotally. He wrote in a comment on Shehata’s post: “Anecdotally, seems we’re all seeing it a lot more often.” His comment doesn’t confirm NewzDash’s rate or how it was measured.
Shehata connects it to the new control: “Using Google’s newer Search Console generative AI opt-out is different, and will likely remove publishers from Top Stories inside AI Overviews.”
That’s his interpretation, which Google hasn’t officially confirmed. According to Google’s help page, sites that are excluded won’t show up in AI features. As of now, Google’s help page doesn’t say how the control handles a traditional feature that’s shown within an AI feature.
If his understanding is correct, choosing to opt out could mean missing out on placements that were never advertised as AI features.
What To Check Before Opting Out
Before anyone touches the new Search Console settings, there are three things to check:
- How much visibility your site gets from AI features
- Which of Google’s controls governs what.
- How the tradeoffs could affect your business.
Start with where your site shows up in AI features today. The generative AI performance report, also rolling out to a subset of accounts, shows impressions from AI features by page, country, device, and date. It combines AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it carries no clicks and no queries.
Broader analytics can show Google organic referrals, time on site, and conversions, but they can’t assign visits to either AI feature. In practice, that means there’s no clean baseline for AI traffic or conversions to weigh the decision against.
The CMA’s requirement says more data should come. Its interpretive notes list impressions, click-throughs, and click-through rate as metrics Google should provide, delivered “through a commonly accessible platform.”
I wrote about that gap when the setting launched without the data to use it. The reports only cover impressions today.
Vahe Arabian, founder and editor-in-chief of State of Digital Publishing, described the working answer this month: “The job isn’t picking a favourite dashboard; it’s blending them into one scorecard.”
Next, sort out which lever controls what. Here’s what the differences are:
- The Search generative AI control affects links and grounding inside Search and Discover AI features.
- Google-Extended controls specified Gemini model training, including training for models used in Search generative AI responses, plus grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI.
Notably, Google-Extended does not determine what content shows up in Search. Search visibility is governed by factors like crawling, indexing, and preview controls, from Googlebot rules to noindex tags and snippet directives. Robots.txt only manages crawling, not content removal from Search. Shehata’s post highlighted the same distinction regarding Google-Extended.
Finally, weigh the variables that matter for your business. For news publishers, Top Stories exposure is one of the things the toggle may control. For ecommerce sites, site content and Merchant Center or Ads participation are separate decisions, because the control doesn’t override either.
For any business, the question is what showing up in AI features is worth against the traffic it may replace, and the honest answer is that the numbers to settle it don’t exist yet.
One argument against opting out has been on record since before the control shipped. Writing earlier this year, while the CMA was still weighing the requirement, Rahul Jain, CEO and co-founder of Noble, argued on LinkedIn: “Opting out of Google’s AI Overviews will hurt most publishers more than it helps.”
His reasoning is that exclusion takes websites away from where the attention is, rather than safeguarding them. Noble sells services designed to help brands appear in AI-generated answers.
The Limits Of The Available Controls
The Search Console control works at the property level, and page-level controls for grounding in generative Search features aren’t due until March 2027 under the CMA’s timeline.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of European Competition Law and Practice this spring, University of Oxford researcher Spencer Cohen and UCL competition-law PhD candidate Todd Davies shared their thoughts that this type of remedy might not be enough.
“We argue that forcing Google to let websites opt-out of appearing in AI Overviews would be ineffective,” Davies, who the paper discloses worked at Google as a software engineer until 2022, wrote in a LinkedIn post summarizing the paper. Their case is that an opt-out doesn’t protect publisher business models or create meaningful choice over how content is used.
Whether the control gives businesses a real choice or a symbolic one depends on data that doesn’t exist yet and placements that are still moving.
Looking Ahead: Click Data & Page-Level Controls Are Coming
Here’s what you can expect in the coming year regarding the decision.
The CMA requires Google to share click data and click-through rates, along with tools for publishers to assess those clicks, with most of these measures starting in December.
By March 2027, Google is required to offer more detailed page-level controls for generative Search features, providing a more precise option than the current property-based settings. Additionally, Google will need to report on its compliance every six months during the first year, moving to annual reports if the regulator is generally satisfied.
The two main things to keep an eye on are whether Google broadens these controls and reports beyond the current group of website owners, and whether the embedded Top Stories pattern becomes more widespread in tracked data. NewzDash has said it plans to test the opt-out effect directly.
Currently, the choice is available, but it’s not clear what the cost of using it might be, and the schedule for measuring that cost is in place.
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