You can now leave Google's AI Overviews without leaving Google Search

Until August 31, a site couldn't leave AI Overviews without leaving Google Search, unless it gave up its snippets with nosnippet. Now there's a Search Console setting that removes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover and leaves its classic rankings alone.

That makes three separate switches on one URL: Search, the AI features inside Search, and Gemini. None of them affects the other two.

What Google shipped

Two things landed together: a setting and a report.

Exclude means your URLs stop appearing as links in the AI features, and your content stops being used to ground their answers. Google says the setting isn't a ranking or inclusion signal anywhere else in Search.

The report sits as a tab under Performance and counts how often your URLs appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date.

On June 3 the UK's Competition and Markets Authority imposed a conduct requirement on Google: publishers must be able to keep content out of AI search features without being penalized for it. Google began testing the toggle with UK sites the same day, and hasn't said whether the toggle is meant to satisfy the order. The help doc is explicit about what it doesn't cover:

Training was already its own decision through Google-Extended. What August 31 added is a separate decision for the AI features inside Search, which until then were bundled with classic results under noindex. Same URL, before and after:

Three switches, and what each one doesn't do

These aren't nested. The strictest one doesn't cover the rest.

The new setting removes the nosnippet tradeoff. What it costs you is precision: it works per property, so per domain, subdomain or URL prefix, not per page, at least until the CMA's March 2027 deadline for page-level controls.

Impressions, and nothing to divide them by

The report shows impressions and nothing else: no clicks, so no CTR; no queries, so no idea which prompts you're answering; no position, so no idea whether you were the first inline link or the eighth. The CMA's own interpretive notes say Google should provide click-throughs and click-through rate for these features, separated from organic. Three months after the order, the global rollout still ships without them. And the impressions it does show are already inside your Web totals, so adding the two reports counts the same appearance twice.

The data has already broken once. From August 13, a logging error cut impressions in the generative AI report. John Mueller confirmed it was a logging issue, not a visibility change. We covered the last time Search Console impressions were wrong, for eleven months. Same lesson: Search Console numbers are inputs, not KPIs.

Should you leave?

Rankings aren't the cost of leaving. What changed is that one crawl now feeds several products and you get a permission for each; the doc says the covered feature list will grow, so expect more switches.

That makes a sitewide robots policy the wrong unit of decision. Your pricing page and your licensed dataset don't share a job or a risk profile, and property-level control is enough granularity to treat them differently.

Decide by the job of the page

What to do this week

1. Open Settings, then Search generative AI, on the domain property and confirm it reads Include. Check the child properties too. Inheritance flows down, so one Exclude on a parent silently covers everything under it.
2. Audit Google-Extended on its own. A block there keeps you out of Gemini, not AI Overviews; decide whether that's still what you want. Our robots.txt checker shows what's actually in the file.
3. Sort pages into three buckets: demand, authority, protect. Only the third is a candidate for exclusion, and only through a URL-prefix property.
4. Pull the generative AI report and read it next to clicks, branded search and pipeline. Never add it to Web impressions.
5. If you still want to leave, test one directory first. Create a URL-prefix property, set it to Exclude, and compare it with a matched directory for a few weeks. If AI impressions vanish and nothing downstream moves, they weren't worth much. If leads dip, switch it back.