Google introduces publisher opt-out for AI Mode and Overviews

Google is introducing an opt-out toggle in Search Console that lets publishers choose whether their sites are included in, and used to ground, its generative-AI Search features such as AI Mode and AI Overviews, Google said in a blog post and 9to5Google reported. Sites that opt out "will not receive traffic or impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode, or AI Overviews in Google Discover" but will continue to appear in regular Google Search and the Discover feed, 9to5Google reported. Google says the control is not used as a ranking signal, and the Gemini app is excluded.

Google is also adding generative-AI metrics to Search Console that show impressions, which pages are used in AI responses, and country-level breakdowns, 9to5Google reported. For publishers and data teams, this is the first native, first-party view of how individual pages feed Google's AI answers and in which markets.

TechCrunch and other outlets report the controls respond to the UK Competition and Markets Authority's Publisher Conduct Requirement, with the substantive obligations taking legal effect on December 3, 2026. The rollout is beginning with a subset of website owners in the UK for testing before any wider launch. Separately, the European Publishers Council has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission alleging Google's AI features use publishers' content without effective opt-outs or fair remuneration, the EPC said, and the News/Media Alliance described Google's opt-out announcement as "cautiously optimistic," the Alliance said.

Separating the generative-AI opt-out from ranking decouples a long-standing tension between indexing for traffic and content extraction for AI answers. Teams that depend on web referral traffic, or that ingest web content for retrieval and training, gain new signals to monitor, and retrieval-augmented-generation and attribution pipelines that source from publisher sites may need to respect a new, machine-readable preference. Comparable platform controls have historically forced updates to source-selection logic, crawler handling, and logging.

Google has said AI Overviews reaches more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly users, figures that frame why referral-traffic effects matter to publishers and regulators.

• •The global rollout cadence and whether the control behaves identically across jurisdictions.
• •Whether the Search Console metrics include historical attribution for pages used before opt-out.
• •Whether third-party SEO and analytics tools add support for the new signal, and how EU and national regulators follow up.