Obility Editorial · · 4 min read
Google now lets any site leave AI Overviews and AI Mode
Since 31 August 2026, every site in Search Console has a setting that did not exist a year ago. Under Settings, a page called Search generative AI lets a site owner include or exclude the site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Google Discover. Google announced it on 3 June as a test with a subset of site owners in the UK, noting its engagement with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, and its post on the Keyword blog now says the control has reached all websites worldwide. Inclusion is the default.
Google’s help page is precise about what exclusion does. Links to your site and your site’s content stop appearing in those features, and content crawled from your site is no longer eligible as an input to generate an AI response. You receive no traffic or impressions from them. Google also says the setting is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search, so your ordinary results are unaffected.
For a news publisher whose articles are the product, that is a real trade to weigh. For a company that wants buyers to put it on a shortlist, the question looks different, because the answer itself does not go away.
The answer about your category is written from other pages
When a buyer asks AI Mode for the best expense software for a fifty person company, Google still writes an answer. Excluding your site changes only which pages it may draw on. The help page says so plainly: content from other sites will still be available in those features, and it may appear similar to yours.
In a category answer, those other sites are your competitors’ product pages, review platforms, comparison articles and forum threads. Google’s page does not say your company’s name disappears from answers, only your links and your own content. So the likely result is an answer that can still mention you, described entirely in other people’s words, with no link to your site and no chance for your own pricing page or documentation to correct an outdated claim. Competitors who left the default in place keep both.
Scale makes this worth a deliberate decision. In the same post, Google says AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode more than one billion monthly users. Those are Google’s own figures and they say nothing about your category, but they explain why a buyer’s first impression of you increasingly comes from one of these answers.
The control leaves training, shopping data and other assistants untouched
Several things teams expect the switch to do, it does not do. It does not affect AI training; Google’s help page points to Google-Extended for that. It does not override your participation in services such as Merchant Center and Google Ads, so the choices you have made there still apply. And Google says your content may still be used to power Search as a whole, for example to help its systems understand the language of queries and pages.
It is also a Google setting and nothing more. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot answer from their own retrieval under their own crawler rules, so excluding your site from AI Mode leaves every other assistant’s view of you exactly as it was. A team that flips the switch to get out of AI answers will have done so for one company’s products only.
Exclude a section, not the site, when content is what you sell
There is a sensible use for brands, and it sits in the fine print about inheritance. The setting belongs to each Search Console property, and a URL-prefix property follows the nearest parent that has set its own value unless its owner overrides it. That lets you exclude a single path, such as a paid research library or a members’ archive whose value lies in people reading it on your site, while product pages and documentation stay eligible.
The same mechanism is a governance risk. Any verified owner of a child property can change its setting, and Google says only that the owner of the top-level domain property will see a notification when a child property overrides the parent. If an agency, a regional team or a former contractor holds a URL-prefix property on your domain, check the Search generative AI page on every property, not only the domain. Changes are not instant either: Google’s page says content is generally excluded within one to two days, with some taking longer because of caching.
Decide by reading the answers you would be leaving
The Search Console report Google launched alongside the control counts impressions of your URLs in these features, by page, country and device. That tells you which pages Google uses. It does not tell you what the answer said about you, which competitors it recommended or which other sources it cited, and those are what you would hand over by excluding.
So before changing the setting, run the buying questions that matter to you in AI Mode and read the full answers. Obility’s Answer Engine Insights is built around that review: the surrounding answer, the competitors it recommends and the sources it cites, kept together for each prompt. If your pages are cited on the questions that decide a shortlist, excluding gives that position to whichever source is cited next.
The honest boundary is that no one can tell you in advance what excluding will cost a particular site in clicks, and Google publishes no figure. For most companies that sell a product rather than content, though, the reasoning runs one way. The control removes your own account of yourself from answers that will be written anyway.