Search Console adds a control to opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode
A new Search Console setting lets publishers separate AI visibility from core search rankings.
Mariano De Vitto · August 2026
Google has quietly introduced a new control inside Search Console that gives publishers a way to opt out of appearing in AI Overviews and the newer AI Mode, without touching how their pages rank or get indexed in traditional search results, a distinction Search Engine Journal was first to report and one that marks a meaningful shift in how Google treats its generative search products relative to its core algorithm.
For years, the only way for a site owner to keep content out of Google's AI generated summaries was to block Googlebot entirely, whether through a robots.txt disallow rule or a noindex tag, both of which meant sacrificing organic visibility altogether. That all or nothing setup forced publishers into an uncomfortable bet: stay eligible for both classic blue links and AI summaries, or disappear from Google search traffic completely. The new Search Console toggle finally breaks that binary, allowing a page to keep competing for standard organic rankings while being excluded specifically from AI Overviews and AI Mode responses.
A New Kind of SEO Lever
This is significant because AI Overviews, and now AI Mode, have become one of the most debated features in modern search, frequently blamed by publishers and marketers for reducing click through rates even on pages that rank at or near the top of results. When Google's AI generates a summarized answer directly on the results page, users often get what they need without ever clicking through, a pattern that hits publishers, retailers, and any brand depending on organic search as a core traffic channel especially hard. Until now, those businesses had no way to address that problem without also losing their conventional search presence, which made the opt out effectively unusable for most sites.
With this update, SEO and content teams can treat AI visibility as a deliberate, page level decision instead of an inevitable byproduct of being indexed. A retailer, for instance, might choose to exclude product pages from AI Overviews if those pages tend to lose clicks to summarized answers, while keeping top of funnel content, like educational guides or comparison articles, eligible for AI exposure where a brand mention inside a generative answer could still drive awareness even without a click.
What Marketers Should Do Next
The practical implication for SEO teams is that this control needs to be added to the toolkit as a new lever, not applied indiscriminately. The smartest approach is an audit: identify which pages are actually benefiting from AI Overviews visibility, whether through brand exposure or supplemental traffic, and which pages are simply losing clicks to a summarized answer that satisfies the searcher's intent before they ever reach the site. From there, teams can apply the opt out selectively, rather than defaulting to blanket blocking or blanket allowance across an entire domain.
This also reinforces a broader trend in search marketing: as generative AI features become permanent fixtures inside Google Search, the winning strategy is rarely about opting fully in or fully out, but about calibrating visibility channel by channel and page by page. Expect more platforms to introduce similarly granular controls as they build out their own AI search experiences, and expect measurement and testing frameworks around AI driven traffic loss to mature quickly as publishers start using tools like this one in production.
The Signal Brief · Mariano De Vitto — Head of Marketing, Barcelona