Google shipped a switch on 31 August, and a regulator is the reason
For two years there was no way to be in Google Search but out of its AI answers. Now there is — and it makes the old advice wrong twice over.
Google, 31 August 2026 · UK Competition and Markets Authority, 3 June 2026 · September 1, 2026 · 3 min read
Until three weeks ago, a business had exactly two options: appear in Google Search and in AI
Overviews, or appear in neither. The only lever anyone had was nosnippet, which suppresses
the AI summary and mangles your ordinary listing at the same time.
That changed on 31 August 2026, worldwide, with a control in Search Console. Google’s wording:
“website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features”
Two details matter more than the switch itself.
It is explicitly not a ranking signal. Google states the control “will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features.” Opting out costs you the impressions from those features and nothing else. That is a meaningful commitment and it removes the fear that has kept publishers from touching any of this.
It arrived with reporting. Search Console now shows impressions from generative AI features, which pages appear, and a geographic breakdown. This is the thing to act on — not the opt-out, the measurement.
Why it exists is the more interesting story. This was not a product decision. On 3 June 2026 the UK Competition and Markets Authority, having designated Google with Strategic Market Status, required it to give publishers effective controls over the use of their content in generative AI, to explain in plain language how that content is used, and to provide detailed metrics on engagement with it. The CMA called the opt-out “a world first”. Google has nine months to implement fully and must report compliance every six months for the first year.
A UK regulator obtained a control that every site owner on earth now has.
In the same announcement, Google discloses the scale of what you’d be opting out of: AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode has passed one billion.
So should you use the opt-out? Almost certainly not. You would be removing yourself from the surface you are trying to appear on, to protect content from a system that is already the largest answer engine on the planet. The publishers with a real case for it are those whose whole business is the click — news, recipes, reference — and even for them it is a hard trade.
The reason it matters to you is different, and it is about the advice you have been given.
For two years, Google-Extended has been recommended as the way to stay out of AI Overviews.
It never was. Google’s own crawler documentation is explicit that Google-Extended governs
Gemini app training and Vertex AI grounding, and that a page appears in AI Overviews if it is
indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. There was no lever. Anyone who told you
otherwise was repeating something that had never been checked against the documentation.
That advice is now wrong twice: it never did the job, and there is now something that does.
The practical action, and it is the same one either way. Open Search Console and look at the generative AI reports. The data starts when Google started collecting it — it does not fill in the past. Whatever date you first look is the earliest date you will ever be able to show anyone. If you do nothing else this month, do that.
One more thing worth watching. Bing shipped an equivalent — AI Performance in Webmaster Tools, public preview from February 2026 — and the two report differently. If you are comparing them, you are comparing different definitions of an impression.
