Google Will Allow Websites To Exclude Themselves From AI Search Results
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Google will allow websites to exclude themselves from AI search results
Big Tech
Google will allow websites to exclude themselves from AI search results
The company says opting out won't impact placement in regular searches.
By Igor Bonifacic
Updated: June 3, 2026 5:33 am EST
Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images
More than three years after it began rolling out AI Overviews and a year after the debut of AI Mode, Google is giving webmasters the option to exclude their domains from its AI-generated search results. In a blog post published early Wednesday morning, the company said it would begin testing a new toggle inside of its Search Console designed to allow website owners to decide if their webpages appear in and help ground the company's latest AI search features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. The company plans to first test the toggle with a small subset of domain owners in the UK before rolling it out globally.
"Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features," Google said. "This control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features."
The opt-out option may have come about due to pressure from UK regulators. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced today that it had imposed the new rule on Google due to its lopsided market power as a "strategic market status" (SMS) company. "This will put publishers, like news organizations, in a stronger position to negotiate content deals with Google," the CMA said in a statement.
In January this year, the UK government announced that it would force Google to implement an opt-out measure to "provide a fairer deal for content publishers, particularly news organizations," the CMA stated at the time. Google responded in March, saying it would develop updates to "let sites specifically opt-out of generative AI features in search."
Alongside the toggle, the company said it's beginning to roll out new insights inside of Search Console designed to provide webmasters with metrics and more information about which of their pages appear in AI responses and in what countries. "We're continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful to inform their strategies, and we'll introduce additional metrics over time," Google said.
Google said that it's "actively listening to feedback from publishers and creators" and engaging with regulators, such as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, when it comes to providing website owners "the right tools as user preferences evolve." The announcement also comes just weeks after the company's I/O 2026 developer keynote where it introduced a new dynamic Search Box that can become larger to fit complex queries, as well as process videos, images, files and even Chrome tabs as inputs. That announcement prompted plenty of articles declaring the death of "Google Search as you know it."
Even if that sentiment was premature, there's been growing resentment toward Google from the very publishers who supply the information that makes the company's AI search features possible, and nowhere were those feelings more acutely expressed than in a recent TBPN interview featuring Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch. The executive said he told the company's teams last year to "assume there's no search" to bolster pageviews and revenue. He later clarified Condé Nast doesn't expect search traffic to literally reach zero, but he did say he expects referrals from Google to represent a single-digit percentage of total traffic moving forward.
Update June 3, 5:26 AM ET: Information was added to the article about the UK's Competition and Markets Authority announcing that it had "imposed" the opt-out rule on Google.
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