How to turn off AI Overviews for your site, and when not to

You can turn off AI Overviews for your own site. In Search Console, set Settings > Search generative AI to Exclude, and Google keeps the site out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's generative AI features without changing how it ranks in regular results. For a single page, nosnippet keeps its text out of AI Overviews and AI Mode but also deletes its description in ordinary results, and blocking Google-Extended in robots.txt doesn't keep you out at all.

Know what that buys before you flip it. Excluding your site doesn't remove the overview. Google says content from other sites stays in it and may look similar to yours, so you give up the citation while the searcher still reads an answer above your link.

How to turn off AI Overviews for your whole site

Use the Search generative AI control in Search Console. It reached every site on August 31, 2026 and defaults to Include.

1. Open your site's top-level property in Search Console. Only property owners can change the setting.
2. Go to Settings, then Search generative AI.
3. Change Include to Exclude.
4. Give it a few days. Google says exclusion generally takes that long, and caching can delay some content further.

According to Google's help page for the setting, Exclude hides your links and content from all three features, so you get no impressions or traffic from them. Google says it isn't a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search and doesn't affect AI training.

Which controls opt out of AI Overviews

Exclude, nosnippet and noindex each keep a page out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, and only Exclude leaves your regular results untouched.

The snippet rules reach AI features because Google's robots meta tag documentation counts AI Overviews and AI Mode as forms of search results. A rule you add to shorten an AI quote shortens your blue-link snippet too.

What nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet do to AI Overviews

All three limit what Google may quote in AI answers and ordinary results at once, so none of them is an AI-only switch.

nosnippet is the page-level opt-out. Google shows no text snippet or video preview for the page in web search, Images, Discover, AI Overviews or AI Mode, and stops using its content as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. A static thumbnail may still appear. max-snippet:0 means the same thing.

max-snippet with a number is a dial. Google caps the snippet at that many characters and limits how much of the page AI Overviews and AI Mode may use as input, but the page stays eligible for citation. A short limit also makes a featured snippet less likely, per Google's featured snippet guide. max-snippet:-1 means no limit.

data-nosnippet hides one passage. Google supports it on span, div and section elements only, and lists it among the controls for its AI features. Wrap the part you can't have quoted, like a price that changes hourly or a paragraph you license from someone else, and leave the rest of the page quotable.

<!-- Whole page, all Google results -->
<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">

<!-- Google only, quotes capped at 120 characters -->
<meta name="googlebot" content="max-snippet:120">

<!-- One passage -->
<div data-nosnippet>Trade prices, updated hourly.</div>

Google-Extended does not block AI Overviews

Disallowing Google-Extended in robots.txt leaves your pages fully eligible for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google's crawler documentation says the token doesn't affect a site's inclusion in Google Search and isn't a ranking signal. It controls whether your content trains future Gemini models and grounds answers in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. It has no user agent of its own, so you won't find it in your logs.

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

Ship that block if you object to training, which Exclude doesn't touch. The two switches are independent, so a site can stay in AI Overviews and out of training, or the reverse.

Blocking Googlebot does keep you out of AI features, along with the rest of Google Search. Our robots.txt checker shows which rule matches Googlebot and Google-Extended for any path, and our AI crawler list covers the training bots other companies run.

What opting out costs you in search traffic

Exclude costs you every impression and click from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and according to Google nothing else. nosnippet costs that plus your description in ordinary results and any featured snippet, which leaves a blue link with only its title to earn the click.

The harder question is what those AI clicks were worth. Pew Research Center tracked the Google searches of 900 US adults in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, they clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when none appeared, and clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits (Pew's report). So a citation earns little direct traffic. Leaving doesn't bring back the 15% either, because the overview stays on the page, built from someone else's content.

Measure your exposure first. Search Console's Generative AI performance report shows AI Overview and AI Mode impressions combined, by page, country, device and date, with no clicks. Google suggests it for estimating what Exclude would cost you. The pages with the most AI impressions are the ones you'd give up.

Should you opt out of AI Overviews?

Most sites should stay in. Opting out takes your name out of the answer while the answer stays on the page, so you lose the brand exposure and still face the lower click rate.

Opting out makes sense in a few cases.

• You are the only source. If nobody else publishes the information, Google has nothing to substitute, so the answer stays on your page. Proprietary data, original research and paywalled reporting fit. A how-to that fifty other sites also explain does not.
• A contract rules out summaries. Syndicated articles and licensed datasets can come with terms that forbid reuse in AI answers.
• A wrong paraphrase is dangerous. Dosages, legal deadlines and prices fall here. data-nosnippet on the passage usually beats excluding the whole site.

Stay in if buyers research your category by asking Google questions. Software, agencies, local services and most ecommerce fit. A citation puts your name in the answer they read before clicking anything, so spend the effort on getting mentioned by AI more often.

If your real problem is being missing from overviews, work through why your site isn't showing up in Google AI Overviews instead.

Opting out per page vs the whole site

The Search Console setting covers the whole site or a section, and snippet rules cover single pages and passages. The setting is per property. A child property, such as a URL-prefix property for https://example.com/research/ or a subdomain, inherits the setting from its closest parent, and its owner can override it. So to exclude one directory, verify it as its own URL-prefix property and set that property to Exclude.

For a section, prefer the property route, since it keeps your regular snippets. Reach for nosnippet when you also want the page out of featured snippets and Discover previews. Files without an HTML head, such as PDFs, need the X-Robots-Tag header:

location ~* \.pdf$ {
    add_header X-Robots-Tag "nosnippet" always;
}

Watch one nginx rule. A location that sets its own add_header stops inheriting every add_header from the server block, so repeat your security headers inside it.

How to turn off AI Overviews when you search

You can't switch them off for good. Google's AI Overviews help page says the features can't be turned off and calls them a core Search feature. Two things work.

• After a search, pick the Web filter in the row of tabs, or under More. Google shows text links without AI Overviews, for that search only.
• To make that the default on desktop, add a custom search engine in your browser with https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14. The udm=14 parameter is what the Web filter puts in the address bar. Google doesn't document it, so it can change without notice.

Skip the tricks. Adding -ai to a query is undocumented, and Google's minus operator exists to exclude words, so it also drops pages that mention AI. Turning off "AI in Search" in Search Labs only opts you out of experiments, per the same help page.

Check which snippet controls your pages send

Our Indexing & Canonical Checker reads one URL's status code, robots.txt rules for Google and Bing, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag directives, the canonical and its target, and the snippet controls. For Google it reports whether the page is indexable and whether its snippet is full, limited or blocked. It flags nosnippet, a max-snippet under 160 characters, data-nosnippet that covers more than half the main content or sits on elements Google ignores, and values such as noai that no major engine documents. For Bing it flags noarchive and nocache, which limit what Copilot may use.

Each finding names the tag or header to change, and a run costs 8 credits. It can't see your Search Console setting and doesn't run JavaScript, so a robots tag added by a script won't appear. Run it after you add or remove a control to confirm each page sends what you decided.