In June 2026, Google announced that it would provide a new toggle in Google Search Console, allowing website publishers to exclude their content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI summaries in Discover. Google explicitly stated that opting out would have no negative impact on a site’s ranking in regular search results. This move mainly stems from regulatory requirements by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which ordered Google to give publishers more control over how their content is used. The new rules also include allowing publishers to prohibit their content from being used to train Google’s internal AI models. The opt-out feature will initially be tested with a select group of UK publishers, with plans to roll it out globally afterwards.
Previously, multiple studies showed that AI Overviews had led to click-through rate declines of up to 79% for top linked sites on some pages, and publishers have long been concerned about traffic erosion. The introduction of this opt-out mechanism is Google’s latest move to balance regulatory pressure and the ecosystem dynamics with content creators. It operates independently of Google’s existing Google-Extended crawler directive and the nosnippet tag, as it specifically targets generative AI search features. The toggle is still being rolled out and is not yet visible to all Search Console users.