Google now lets you opt out of AI Overviews. Don't.
Search Console now has a toggle to pull your pages from AI Overviews and AI Mode. For most B2B and SaaS sites, flipping it costs traffic and fixes nothing.
Google just added a switch to Search Console that lets you opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode. Before you touch it, know this: for almost every B2B and SaaS site, leaving it alone is the right call.
The control started rolling out to selected site owners this month, after a UK-first launch tied to a regulator mandate on June 17. It sits in Search Console under Settings, in a section labeled Search generative AI. Two independent write-ups, from Search Engine Roundtable and PPC Land, lay out what it does.
What Google actually shipped
There are two settings, and they do different things. The first keeps your pages out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative parts of Discover while other sites still show up. The second stops Google from linking to your content or using it to support an AI answer at all.
Here's the part that matters for the decision: Google says neither option changes your ranking or your inclusion anywhere else in Search. Flip the toggle and you don't get downranked. You just vanish from the AI surfaces. That sounds clean. It isn't.
Why opting out of AI Overviews costs more than it saves
AI Overviews now show on close to half of all searches. AI Mode has its own growing user base. When you opt out, you remove yourself from the box that sits above the blue links on those queries, and you hand that space to whoever stayed in. Your competitor's paragraph gets cited. Yours doesn't exist.
The traffic math rarely works in favor of leaving. AI surfaces still send clicks, and the sites cited in an answer are the ones that get them. We covered how to size that channel in this piece on measuring AI search clicks. Opting out doesn't win those visits back through blue links. It deletes a source of them.
Think about who presses a button like this in a hurry. It's usually a reaction to one scary chart: sessions down, AI Overviews up, someone in a meeting asking why. Opting out feels like taking back control. What it actually does is trade a measurable channel for a feeling.
The toggle is blunt, and Gemini ignores it
Two limits make the switch worse than it looks. It works at the site level, not the query level. You can't stay visible on your commercial pages and pull back only your docs or your help content. It's all in or all out.
And it doesn't cover the Gemini app. A publisher who excludes their content from AI Overviews and AI Mode can still find it summarized inside Gemini. So the scenario people opt out to avoid, an AI reading your work and answering for you, keeps happening on the surface the toggle doesn't reach.
Measure before you decide
Google shipped generative AI performance reports in Search Console on June 3, so you can now see how your pages show up in AI features before you make any call. Look at your impressions and clicks from those surfaces first. If AI Overviews are sending you real traffic, opting out is throwing it away. If they're citing you and sending nothing, the fix is better pages and clearer answers, not vanishing from search. Here's how to read that report.
The move that pays is getting cited, not hiding
If an AI answer is going to appear on your query whether you like it or not, the goal is to be the source it quotes. That means answering the question in the first two sentences of the page, using clear headers, and backing claims with specifics a model can lift. Pages that already rank well and read cleanly tend to get cited. Thin pages that bury the answer don't. The work is the same work that wins featured snippets, and it pays on both surfaces at once.
Who should actually consider the toggle
A few cases make it reasonable. A subscription or membership site whose whole product is the content behind a paywall. A publisher who has done the math and knows AI Overviews cannibalize sales with no referral upside. A brand under a legal or licensing constraint on where its text can appear. If you're one of those, use the second setting, the one that stops Google using your content to support answers, and watch your traffic for a month. For everyone else selling a service or a product, the box above the links is worth being in.
If you want help reading your AI search numbers and deciding what to do about them, that's the kind of work we do. We'd rather you make the call from your own data than from a headline.
