Google now writes an AI answer at the top of the search results, under the name AI Overviews, and may mention your business inside it. Since June 2026 you have been able to opt out of AI Overviews altogether. The switch is free, it takes a minute to find, and the question it raises is harder than it looks: should you use it?
Here is what the switch removes, what it does not touch, what you give up, and a ten-minute way to decide.
What changed on 3 June 2026
On 3 June 2026 the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) required Google to let website owners withhold their content from AI features in search. It was the first binding requirement of its kind on a major technology platform in the UK, following Google's designation in October 2025 as having strategic market status in UK search.
Google responded the same day. It launched a control inside Search Console, the free tool website owners use to track their performance in Google, and tested it with UK website owners first. On 31 August 2026 Google confirmed that the control and the matching performance report were available to every website in the world.
The CMA's requirement applies to results shown to people in the UK. The switch itself is one setting for the whole website, not a decision for each page.
What switching off actually removes
Set the control to exclude and your links and page content stop appearing in AI Overviews, in AI Mode, and in the AI-generated parts of Google Discover. You also stop receiving any impressions or visits those features would have sent. Other websites keep appearing in those answers, often covering much the same ground as you.
Two limits are worth knowing. It applies to the whole site, so you cannot switch off one section and leave the rest, and it takes a day or two to take effect, sometimes longer while Google's copies catch up.
Where the switch lives: Search Console, then Settings, then Search generative AI. There are two choices, "include" (the default) and "exclude". If your website has never been verified in Search Console, you have no switch to flip and no report to read.
What it will not do
It will not affect your normal rankings. Google states that the setting is not used as a ranking signal anywhere else in Search, and the CMA's requirement explicitly forbids Google from penalising a site that opts out: no downranking in ordinary results, and no loss of your standard listing.
It will not remove you from Google. Your pages stay in the regular results exactly as they were.
It will not stop AI training. Whether Google may use your pages to teach its models is a separate control called Google-Extended. The switch in Search Console only covers how your content is used when search answers are written.
What you would give up
The report that comes with the switch shows impressions only: how often your pages appeared in an AI answer, split by page, country, date and device. There is no click data. The CMA has required Google to supply engagement figures including click-throughs, but that is not live yet, so you can see that you were seen without seeing whether it paid.
There is also the mention itself. The CMA's January 2026 consultation papers refer to Google's own internal experiment, in which clicks to publisher sites fell when an AI Overview appeared on the results page. The exact figure is withheld from the published document. What is not in doubt is that a reader who gets the answer on Google's page may never reach yours.
Google said in June 2026 that AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion users a month, and that AI Mode has passed a billion. Opting out does not shrink that audience. It leaves you out of it.
The problem to fix first
For plenty of small business websites the switch changes nothing, because those sites do not appear in AI answers to begin with. Open the generative AI performance report and set it to the last three months. If the numbers are zero, or the report is not there at all, there is nothing to turn off.
The usual reasons are ordinary ones. Pages that build themselves in the browser, so an automated reader arrives at an empty shell. Headings that say "our services" instead of the question a customer actually types. Content so thin that an AI answer has nothing worth quoting. A toggle fixes none of that.
What does fix it: clear headings that match real questions, a short direct answer near the top of each page, structured data so machines can tell what you sell and where, and pages that arrive as plain HTML. That is the work behind our AEO Setup service, and our AI Website Audit lists which pages AI systems can read and which they skip. For the wider argument, see what answer engine optimisation is and why it matters to a small business.
How to decide in ten minutes
1. Open the report. In Search Console, go to Performance and choose the generative AI report. Set it to the last three months and group it by page. You are looking for one thing: does anything appear?
2. Decide at website level. If you get impressions and you want them, leave the control alone. If you get none, switching off is decoration and your effort belongs on making the site readable. If you publish for a living and your traffic has slipped, opting out is a reasonable experiment, but you cannot measure it for long: once you are excluded, the report goes quiet, so watch your ordinary Search Console clicks instead.
3. Put a date in the diary. The main duties in the CMA's requirement come into force on 3 December 2026, and Google's first compliance report covering that period is due on 3 January 2027. Controls that work folder by folder are part of the December deadline, with page-by-page control required from 3 March 2027. If click data is going to arrive, that is the window to look again.
Our recommendation for a typical UK service business: stay in. Make your pages readable, check the report once a month, and revisit the choice in December 2026. Opting out is a defensible call for a publisher whose business runs on page views. For a business that wants to be found, it mostly hands the answer to a competitor.
This article explains how Google's settings and the CMA's requirement worked in October 2026. Settings and deadlines change, so check Google's Search Console help pages for the current position.
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