Should you opt out of AI Overviews? The Search Console control, explained

What the Search Console generative AI control does

The Search generative AI control is a Search Console setting that decides whether a site's links and content can appear in Google's generative AI features and help ground their answers. The Search Console help page for the control lists three features it covers today: AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover. Google says it expects to update that list over time.

The setting sits under Settings, then Search generative AI, in each Search Console property, and it has three choices:

• Include. The site can appear as a link in those features and help ground their answers. This is the default for every property.
• Exclude. The site's links and content are kept out of those features, including as grounding, and the site gets no traffic or impressions from them.
• Inherit control from parent. The property follows the setting of the closest parent property that set its own. This is the default for a property that has a parent.

Google announced the control on June 3, 2026, in a post on new controls and insights for website owners, and tested it first with a subset of website owners in the UK. The post, updated August 31, 2026, says the control and the matching reports have now rolled out to all websites worldwide. Google says exclusion generally takes a few days: content is excluded within 1 to 2 days after the change goes live, and some takes longer because of caching and propagation across Google's systems.

Does opting out of AI Overviews hurt your normal rankings?

Opting out of AI Overviews does not affect a site's normal Google rankings, according to Google. The control's help page says it is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal in other parts of Search, and Google's announcement says the same about search results outside the generative AI features.

Three limits on what Exclude does are written into the same help page:

• Other sites still feed the answer. Content from other sites stays available to the AI features, and Google notes it may look similar to yours.
• Google can still use the site to run Search. Its content may still help Google's systems understand the language of queries and pages.
• Other programs are untouched. The control does not override a site's choice to take part in services such as Merchant Center and Google Ads.

The first limit is the one that decides most cases. Excluding a site removes its links from an AI Overview. It does not remove the AI Overview, which still answers the question with other sites' pages.

How the control compares with nosnippet, noindex and Google-Extended

The Search generative AI control is one of six ways to limit how Google's AI uses a site, and it is the only one that targets the AI features in Search without touching classic results. The other five come from the robots meta tag specification and Google's crawler documentation.

Two rows are easy to confuse with the Search control. nosnippet does keep a page out of AI Overviews and AI Mode as an input, but it also strips the text snippet from the page's ordinary blue link, which the Search control leaves alone. Google-Extended is the training lever: the control's help page says it does not affect AI training and points to Google-Extended for that, while Google's crawler documentation says Google-Extended has no effect on inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

Timing differs too. Google's guide to AI features and your website says a recrawl can take anywhere from several days to several months, so the page-level controls are slower than the Search Console switch.

What the generative AI performance report shows, and what it leaves out

Search Console's generative AI performance report counts how often links to a site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that count is its only measure. Its help page and Google's launch post describe one measure, impressions, and four ways to group it.

The missing clicks are not lost. Google's help page on impressions, position and clicks says a click on a link in an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts as a click, and that every link in an AI Overview shares the one position the overview occupies. Google's AI features guide says those clicks are reported in the ordinary Performance report under the Web search type, mixed in with classic results. A site can see which pages appear in AI features, but not which searches showed them or how many visits they sent.

Tools that read Search Console through its API cannot fill the gap. The Search Analytics API reference, last updated August 11, 2026, lists six result types (web, image, video, news, Discover and Google News) and none for generative AI features. The AI-only figures come from the Search Console screen or its export, and the export writes values shown as ~ or - as zeros. The Discover version of the report also counts impressions only, grouped by page, country and date.

How many clicks AI Overviews send

No public source says how many clicks AI Overviews send a given site. Pew Research Center's study of real browsing found few clicks on links inside AI summaries. A Pew Research Center analysis, published July 22, 2025, followed the browsing of 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. Its findings:

• On searches with an AI summary, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% on searches without one.
• People clicked a link inside the AI summary on 1% of visits that showed one.
• People ended their browsing session after 26% of searches with a summary, against 16% without.

Google reads its features differently. Its June 2026 announcement says AI Overviews have over 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode over one billion, and that Google has increased the number of inline links in responses. Its AI features guide says clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, meaning visitors are more likely to spend more time on the site. Pew's figures are from March 2025, so they may not describe today's link layout.

For the opt-out decision, the numbers cut both ways. If links inside AI answers send few clicks, as Pew found, excluding a site gives up little traffic. It also gains little: the AI answer still appears above the site's classic result, built from other pages, and Pew found classic results were clicked less often whenever a summary was present.

Who should consider opting out

Opting out of AI Overviews suits a site whose content loses value when an AI answer is built from it, and rarely suits a brand that wants to be found. The test is whether being a source costs more than being a link is worth.

Agencies have one extra reason to leave the setting alone without a client's say-so. Exclude applies to every page the property covers, and it can cascade: by Google's inheritance rules, a domain property's choice flows to every child property that has not set its own.

How to test the opt-out on one section first

The way to measure what opting out of AI Overviews costs is to exclude one section of a site and watch its clicks, because no report shows the AI-only clicks. Search Console's inheritance rules make that possible: a URL-prefix property for a folder is a child of the domain property, and the control's help page says a child's owner can set its own value.

1. Pick a section with plenty of AI impressions, such as a guides folder, and a similar section to leave alone as the comparison.
2. Export the generative AI report grouped by page, and the Performance report's clicks for the same pages over the last 28 days.
3. Add the test folder to Search Console as a URL-prefix property, for example https://example.com/guides/, and verify it. It inherits the domain's setting until you change it.
4. In that property only, open Settings, then Search generative AI, and choose Exclude.
5. After a few days, check that the folder's impressions in the generative AI report have stopped.
6. Compare clicks for both sections over equal-length windows before and after, starting on the same weekday. If the test folder falls and the comparison folder does not, the gap is roughly what AI features were sending, net of searchers who now click the classic result instead.
7. Keep the test, widen it to the domain, or set the folder back to Inherit or Include.

Three cautions apply. A Google core update or a seasonal swing inside the window moves both folders, which is why the comparison folder matters. Exclude also covers Discover's AI features, so check the Discover report too if the folder gets Discover traffic. And Google's help page gives no timing for switching back, so plan the test as if the return could take as long as the exclusion.

Where overads fits

overads fits the reading side of this decision, not the setting itself. overads Signals connects a site's Search Console property and shows the Google searches the site already ranks for. The overads channel hub lists that connection as read-only: overads asks Google for the read-only Search Console permission and writes nothing back. So overads cannot switch the generative AI control on or off; that happens in Search Console.

overads does not split out AI Overview or AI Mode traffic either. Signals reads Search Console through Google's API, and the API has no generative AI result type, so the AI-only impressions stay in Search Console's own report. Signals' separate AI-answer scan is built to ask Gemini and Perplexity how they describe a brand, and it is switched off on the live product. It does not cover Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot.

A team that needs AI answer tracking across more engines now needs a dedicated AI visibility tool, and our comparison of overads with Peec AI sets out what one such tool covers. For the engines outside Google, our guides to earning citations in ChatGPT and getting cited in Perplexity cover what each one reads, and GEO vs AEO vs SEO maps which first-party report measures which surface.