What Opting Out Of Google’s AI Search Features Means Now via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern
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Conversion leadership splits by industry. 20M data points, 20 GBP tactics. 🔥SEJ Pro Course: Own Your Brand’s Promo Code & Coupon Search Results Before Parasites Do Google's AI search opt-out is rolling out as Top Stories appear inside AI Overviews. What the control covers and what businesses can measure before deciding. SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern 24 seconds ago ⋅ 9 min read SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal Bio Follow Google is rolling out a Search Console setting that lets you pull your content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s AI features without leaving Search. That’s a choice we haven’t had before, and regulators in the UK now require Google to offer it. Whether to use it is a harder question than it seems because the tradeoffs keep stacking up. Tracking data released this week by NewzDash, which sells news-visibility tracking to publishers, found Top Stories carousels rendering inside AI Overviews on U.S. trending news results. That means opting out of AI could mean opting out of Top Stories. Here’s what the new Search Console setting does, how it got here, and what’s worth knowing before you touch it. The Search generative AI control lives under Settings in Search Console. Google is rolling it out to a subset of website owners, so not every account has it yet. The default option to include your website lets content appear as links and helps ground AI responses in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s generative AI features, with whatever impressions and traffic that brings. Excluding your site removes it from those features, links included. Google said it would begin respecting these changes on June 17. Changes generally take a few days to process, then content should drop out within one to two days, though caching can delay it. The setting isn’t a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search, so using it shouldn’t affect regular results. It doesn’t override separate choices in Merchant Center or Google Ads, so Shopping participation stays its own decision. And it doesn’t touch AI training, which runs through a different control. The choice began appearing on accounts outside the UK in July. Jamie Indigo, Director of Technical SEO at Cox Automotive, flagged the setting on a U.S. account on LinkedIn: “Search generative AI controls in Google Search Console. I’m not even British and it’s not even my birthday!” Until this year, there was no way to keep a page out of Google’s AI features without keeping it out of Search. Robots.txt, noindex, and snippet directives have been around long before AI Overviews. None of these tools specifically separate generative features from others. For example, Nosnippet removes content from AI Overviews, but it also takes out traditional snippets at the same time. This all-or-nothing approach was something Google acknowledged in January, when it mentioned it was exploring ways to opt out of AI features. Google-Extended has addressed some of this issue. The robots.txt token controls whether crawled content can be used for training future Gemini models that power Gemini Apps and the Vertex AI API for Gemini, and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. It didn’t control whether content could appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google’s crawler docs say Google-Extended doesn’t affect a site’s inclusion in Search and isn’t a ranking signal. The Search Console setting offers a different choice by removing a site from Google’s AI features and nothing else. It was born through a regulator and a product team working on the same problem at once. Google made a statement in January that landed the same day the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opened a consultation on requiring AI opt-outs. In June, the CMA imposed a conduct requirement requiring Google to give websites more control over how their content is used in generative AI, and Google began testing the toggle with UK properties the same week. In the UK, this requirement makes the control obligations mandatory, with deadlines extending into next year. Google’s setting treats AI features and regular results as separate things. The issue with that is Google’s results don’t always separate AI and organic results. When a Top Stories carousel from organic search renders inside an AI Overview, one toggle may control both. John Shehata, CEO and founder of NewzDash and GDdash, put a number on it: “Nearly 1 in 6 U.S. trending news queries now place Top Stories inside AI Overviews.” The 15.5% rate applies to tracked results where Google displayed Top Stories, not to all queries NewzDash tracked. The UK figure is 17.46%. Additionally, he found the embedded carousel and the standalone version didn’t appear together. NewzDash hasn’t published sample sizes or collection dates alongside the figures. Kyle Sutton, Head of SEO and AI Discovery at The Washington Post, sees the same pattern anecdotally. He wrote in a comment on Shehata’s post: “Anecdotally, seems we’re all seeing it a lot more often.” His comment doesn’t confirm NewzDash’s rate or how it was measured. Shehata connects it to the new control: “Using Google’s newer Search Console generative AI opt-out is different, and will likely remove publishers from Top Stories inside AI Overviews.” That’s his interpretation, which Google hasn’t officially confirmed. According to Google’s help page, sites that are excluded won’t show up in AI features. As of now, Google’s help page doesn’t say how the control handles a traditional feature that’s shown within an AI feature. If his understanding is correct, choosing to opt out could mean missing out on placements that were never advertised as AI features. Before anyone touches the new Search Console settings, there are three things to check: Start with where your site shows up in AI features today. The generative AI performance report, also rolling out to a subset of accounts, shows impressions from AI features by page, country, device, and date. It combines AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it carries no clicks and no queries. Broader analytics can show Google organic referrals, time on site, and conversions, but they can’t assign visits to either AI feature. In practice, that means there’s no clean baseline for AI traffic or conversions to weigh the decision against. The CMA’s requirement says more data should come. Its interpretive notes list impressions, click-throughs, and click-through rate as metrics Google should provide, delivered “through a commonly accessible platform.” I wrote about that gap when the setting launched without the data to use it. The reports only cover impressions today. Vahe Arabian, founder and editor-in-chief of State of Digital Publishing, described the working answer this month: “The job isn’t picking a favourite dashboard; it’s blending them into one scorecard.” Next, sort out which lever controls what. Here’s what the differences are: Notably, Google-Extended does not determine what content shows up in Search. Search visibility is governed by factors like crawling, indexing, and preview controls, from Googlebot rules to noindex tags and snippet directives. Robots.txt only manages crawling, not content removal from Search. Shehata’s post highlighted the same distinction regarding Google-Extended.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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