More than three years after the launch of the AI Overview feature,AI Overviews One year after launching “AI Mode,” Google gives website owners the option to exclude their domains from search results generated by artificial intelligence.
In a blog post on Wednesday morning, the company announced that it will begin testing a new option in the Search Console that enables site owners to decide whether their pages will appear in AI-powered search results, including “AI Overview” and “AI Mode,” enhancing the effectiveness of this feature. The company plans to test the option first with a small group of domain owners in the UK before rolling it out globally.
“Sites that opt out will not receive any traffic or impressions from our AI-generated features,” Google said. “This choice will not be used as a factor in ranking search results outside of these features.” This opt-out option may have come in response to pressure from UK regulators. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today announced that it has imposed a new rule on Google due to its disproportionate market dominance as a “strategic market positioning” (SMS) company. The authority said in a statement: “This decision will strengthen the position of publishers, such as news organizations, in negotiating content deals with Google.”
Regulatory pressures shape Google’s new policy
In January this year, the British government announced its intention to force Google to implement an opt-out mechanism with the aim of “providing a fairer deal for content publishers, in particular news organisations”, the Competition and Markets Authority said at the time. Google responded in March, saying it would develop updates that “enable sites to explicitly opt out of generative AI features in search.”
Advanced analytical tools to address publishers’ concerns
Alongside this mechanism, the company announced that it has begun rolling out new insights within Search Console, designed to provide webmasters with additional metrics and information about which pages appear in AI results, and in which countries. “We continue to work with website owners to understand which insights are most useful in guiding their strategies, and we will add additional metrics over time,” Google added.
Google announced that it is “listening carefully to the views of publishers and creators” and is collaborating with regulators, such as the UK Competition and Markets Authority, to provide website owners with “the right tools as user preferences evolve.” This announcement comes a few weeks after the company’s keynote speech at a conference I/O 2026 For developers, it introduced a new dynamic search box that is scalable to accommodate complex queries, in addition to processing videos, images, files, and even Chrome browser tabs as input. This announcement sparked numerous articles declaring the end of “Google Search as we know it.”
Even if this view is premature, resentment toward Google has been growing by the same publishers who provide the company with the information that enables its AI-powered search features, and this sentiment was never more evident than in a recent TBPN interview with Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast.
Lynch said he asked the company’s teams last year to “assume no search” to increase page views and revenue. He later clarified that Condé Nast doesn’t expect search traffic to literally reach zero, but said he expects referrals from Google to account for a single-digit percentage of total traffic in the future.
