What happened

When you search on Google, there’s often a block of AI-written text above the results. Google calls it an AI Overview. The AI writes it by drawing on several websites, and lists the pages it cites alongside. Google has now given site owners a switch: flip it, and your site stops being used in those overviews.

The switch lives in Google Search Console, Google’s dashboard for website owners, where you can see how often your site turns up in Google and change a few settings. It started as a test on 3 June, open only to a subset of sites in the UK. On 31 August 2026, less than three months later, it opened to every website in the world, Taiwan included. Even if you’ve never logged into Search Console yourself, whoever runs your website can flip this switch today if they have access.

Find the control (it’s labelled “Search generative AI control”) and set it to “exclude”, and your site’s links and content stop appearing in several of Google’s AI features, and your pages are no longer used as material for the answers they write. Besides AI Overviews, that covers AI Mode (the tab on the search page where the AI answers you directly and you can ask follow-ups) and the AI features in Discover (the feed of recommended articles in the Google app on your phone).

Google’s official help page says the control isn’t used as a ranking signal, so where you rank in regular search results isn’t affected. A change generally takes a few days to fully kick in. Sites that have never touched the setting are included by default, which means the AI keeps using them as normal. Google also says the list of features the control covers will be updated.

Why it matters to you

Most brands shouldn’t flip it, though, and you don’t need to look far for the reasons; Google’s own help page spells them out.

Start with what you give up. According to the help page, sites that opt out get no traffic or impressions from these features, so opting out means handing over the whole placement. As for how big that placement is, Google gave its own figures in June: more than 2.5 billion people use AI Overviews every month, and AI Mode has passed a billion monthly users.

More importantly, when you leave, the answers stay. The help page says content from other sites will still appear in those features, and “it may appear similar to yours.” Say you run a family-friendly B&B in Hualien. After you opt out, someone searches for “family-friendly B&B Hualien”, and the AI Overview still writes them an answer. It just cites another B&B’s pages instead, quite possibly a competitor’s. The customer reads the whole answer without ever seeing you, and you get no chance to put your side. It works the same way for a restaurant or a tutoring centre.

If the reason you’re tempted is that you don’t want Google’s AI learning from your content, this switch won’t help either. Two things need separating here. An AI Overview uses your pages at the moment a customer searches, to write that answer. “Learning” is Google feeding web content to its AI over time to train it. This switch covers only those AI features inside Google Search, and the help page notes that it doesn’t affect AI training. As for whether Gemini, Google’s chatbot, can learn from your content or use your pages to back up its answers, that’s a separate setting (called Google-Extended), and this switch doesn’t touch it either.

Add it up, and all the switch gets you is AI Overviews no longer using your content. What it costs is the chance for customers to see you in the overview. For a news publisher whose content is the product, that trade may be worth running the numbers on. For a brand that makes its money by being found and recommended, the numbers come out against it every time.

What to do about it

Leave it alone; there’s nothing you need to do. Inclusion is the default, so doing nothing keeps you in AI Overviews. If someone else runs your website, at most ask them to confirm it hasn’t been set to “exclude”. If there’s one section you genuinely don’t want summarised, such as a paid members’ area, you still don’t need to switch off the whole site: the help page explains that a section can be set separately in Search Console. Leave the how to whoever runs your website.

Your attention is better spent on how AI Overviews describe you right now. When a customer’s search brings you up, how does the AI introduce you? Is the line after your name “great for kids, spotless rooms”, or “a bit far from town”? Is the cited page yours, or something someone else wrote about you? Search Console can’t tell you. It does have a performance report for the AI features, but all it gives you is how often you were seen, which pages appeared and in which countries. None of it tells you what the answer actually said about you.

Searching once yourself won’t settle it either, because the overview you see on your own computer isn’t necessarily the one a customer sees. You probably search for your B&B’s name, while customers type something like “Hualien B&B OK for kids”. When the wording changes, the pages the overview cites and the line that follows your name can change with it. What’s on your screen is one phrasing out of many, and one search settles nothing.

Getting the full picture of how the overviews describe you takes many different phrasings, checked systematically and regularly. That’s the job of our managed GEO service at geoweb.tw. GEO is about getting AI to describe you accurately when it answers questions, and to recommend you. With the managed service, our team fixes your website content, makes what other websites say about you consistent, and regularly checks how each AI engine describes you. All you do is sign off on the results.

To see how AI Overviews describe you now, book some time with one of our consultants and have them show you on the spot: they’ll search Google using a few phrasings your customers actually type, so you can see which sentence follows your name when the overview mentions you, and whose pages it cites.

Further reading