What happened

As of 31 August 2026, every website in the world has access to a Google Search Console setting called the Search generative AI control.

Set it to “exclude” and your site’s links and content stop appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Google Discover, and your pages are no longer used as input for the answers those features generate. Google’s official help page says the control isn’t used as a ranking signal, so regular search results aren’t affected. A change generally takes a few days to fully kick in. If you’ve never touched the setting, you’re included by default. Google also says it expects to update the list of features the control covers.

The control only started testing on 3 June, with a subset of site owners in the UK, at a time when Google was engaging with regulators such as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Getting from a limited UK trial to every site on the planet took less than three months. When we covered the UK side in mid-August, Google hadn’t even put a date on going global.

Why it matters to you

The switch is now sitting in the Search Console of every site owner in Taiwan. Most brands shouldn’t touch it, and the reasons follow straight from Google’s own help page.

Opting out means handing over the whole placement. According to the help page, sites that opt out get no traffic or impressions from these features. As for how big that placement is, Google’s June announcement supplied its own figures: more than 2.5 billion monthly active users for AI Overviews, and over a billion monthly users for AI Mode.

And when you leave, the answers stay. The help page says content from other sites will still be available in those features, and “it may appear similar to yours.” When someone asks about your line of business, the AI Overview still answers. It just cites other people’s pages instead, quite possibly your competitors’, and leaves you no place to put your side.

The switch is narrow, too. It covers only those AI features inside Google Search, and the help page notes that it doesn’t affect AI training. Whether Google can use your content to train Gemini models, or to ground answers in the Gemini app, is governed by a separate robots.txt token called Google-Extended. The two are independent. Flip one and the other stays exactly where it was.

What the switch buys you, then, is not being summarised. What it costs is your seat in the summary. For a news publisher whose content is the product, that trade is at least 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. Inclusion is the default, so doing nothing keeps you in. If there’s one section you genuinely don’t want summarised, such as a members-only area, you still don’t need to switch off the whole site: the help page explains that the control follows Search Console properties, and a subdirectory set up as its own property can be configured separately.

Your attention is better spent on how AI Overviews describe you right now. When your brand name comes up, what sentence sits next to it? Is the cited page yours, or something someone else wrote about you? The generative AI performance report in Search Console gives you impressions, which pages appeared, and in which countries. None of it tells you what the answer actually said about you.

Nor is the summary you see when you search once on your own computer necessarily the one a customer sees. Customers don’t use your words, and when the phrasing changes, the pages the summary cites and the line that follows your brand name may change with it. What’s on your screen is one phrasing out of many. The report doesn’t show content and your own searches only show one angle, so working out how the summaries describe you takes someone querying systematically across different phrasings until a fuller picture comes together. One search settles nothing.

To find out which sentence follows your brand name in AI Overviews, and whose pages they cite, set up a demo and we’ll show you every summary we find, sources included.

Further reading