Google’s New AI Opt-Out Switch: Check Your Site Isn’t Excluded

What is the Search generative AI control?

Search generative AI is a sitewide setting inside Google Search Console that decides whether your pages can appear as links inside Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features in Discover. Google rolled it out to every Search Console property worldwide as of 31 August 2026, giving site owners an explicit switch they can see and change.

It sits alongside the older, page-level controls — noindex, nosnippet, data-nosnippet — but works at the property level instead of the page level. Where those tags govern one page at a time, this setting governs whether the whole site is eligible to be drawn into Google’s generative features at all.

Where do you find the setting in Search Console?

It lives under Settings → Search generative AI in Search Console, on a per-property basis. If you manage more than one property for the same domain — a domain property and a URL-prefix property, for example, or separate properties for subdomains — each one can carry its own value unless it inherits from a parent, which is part of why it is easy for one property to end up on a different setting without anyone deciding that on purpose.

The setting applies to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features inside Google Discover specifically. It has nothing to do with ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any other answer engine — those decide crawler access through robots.txt rules for crawlers like OAI-SearchBot, which is a separate mechanism entirely (see how to rank in ChatGPT search results).

What do Include, Exclude and Inherit actually mean?

There are three options, and the names are close to literal. Include is the default for every property and means Google may use your content and cite your pages inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover results. Exclude removes that eligibility. Inherit from parent property tells a sub-property to follow whatever the parent property is set to, rather than carry its own independent value.

Nothing about this setting touches AI training. That is Google-Extended’s job, a separate and independent control. You can be included in AI Overviews and still block Google-Extended, or the reverse; the two settings do not move together.

What does excluding your site actually do?

Excluding a property means links to your site and your content stop appearing inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s generative features, and your pages are no longer used as input when Google generates those AI responses. That is the entire effect. It does not remove your pages from the regular ten-blue-links results, it does not touch your regular snippet, and it is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search.

Other sites are not affected by your choice. If a competitor is included and you exclude yourself, Google simply draws on their content instead of yours for the same query — your absence does not shrink the feature, it just removes one candidate source from it.

If the goal is to leave Google Search altogether, this is the wrong lever. That is what noindex is for. Search generative AI only ever governs the generative features; a page can be fully indexed, ranking normally, and still excluded from being cited inside an AI Overview.

Why check this even if you never touched it?

Include is the default, so most properties never need to touch this setting at all. The reason to check anyway is the same reason worth checking any default: a new admin, a migration, or an agency with Search Console access could change a property-level setting without it being the thing anyone remembers discussing six months later. A setting nobody chose on purpose is still a setting that is doing something.

This matters more than it might seem, given how much search behavior has already shifted toward these features. Across the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click, up from 60.45% in 2024, and Pew Research Center found that when an AI summary appears, people click a traditional result 8% of the time versus 15% when it does not. A site accidentally excluded from AI Overviews is not losing a marginal channel — it is opting out of an increasingly large share of how search results get consumed at all.

Checking takes about two minutes: open Search Console for each property tied to your domain, go to Settings → Search generative AI, and confirm it reads Include (or Inherit, pointed at a parent that reads Include). That is the whole audit.

How long do changes take to show up?

Google says changes to this setting generally take effect within a few days. If you switch a property to Exclude, your content stops being used in these features within one to two days of that change going live, though caching on Google’s side can push the effect out further for some pages. There is no instant toggle. Google documents the timing for excluding; expect switching back to Include to take time as well, while its systems catch up.

That lag is one more reason to check the setting proactively rather than reactively. If you only discover an accidental exclusion after noticing a drop in the Generative AI performance report, you are already several days into lost eligibility before you even start the days-long process of reversing it.

Is there ever a good reason to exclude your site?

Occasionally, yes, and it is worth naming the trade-off plainly rather than treating Exclude as always a mistake. A publisher whose entire business model depends on the click itself — subscription content, ad-supported pages where a summary would satisfy the reader without a visit, or content the owner does not want summarized without a click at all — might reasonably decide the AI Overview citation is worth less than protecting that visit.

For almost every other kind of business, including one built around lead generation, a citation inside an AI Overview is a form of visibility, not a substitute for one. The trade-off only makes sense when the citation itself would cannibalize the thing you are actually selling, which for most local service businesses and real estate sites is not the case.