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Google will allow websites to block the display of their content in search results generated by artificial intelligence. The company’s representatives emphasize that such a refusal to cooperate will not worsen the position of resources in the formation of traditional search results. After more than three years since the first launch of AI Overviews and one year since AI Mode, Google is now providing website administrators with a tool to exclude their websites from search results generated by AI algorithms. In its latest post on the official blog, the corporation announced the start of testing a new switch inside the Search Console service.
This feature is designed to help owners of online resources determine whether their materials can appear in the system’s latest intelligent search options, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, and serve as the basis for generating answers. Initially, Google plans to test this functionality on a limited number of domain owners in the UK, after which the tool will be available worldwide.
Google noted that web resources that use this option and refuse to integrate will no longer receive user clicks or impressions in blocks with generative AI functions. At the same time, the company assured that this control will not become a ranking factor for search results that are outside the scope of these intelligent generative search options.
The emergence of this opt-out option was likely the result of administrative pressure from the British regulatory authorities. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has just announced the implementation of this new rule for Google, given its dominant and disproportionate market position as a corporation with “strategic market status” (SMS). The CMA statement emphasizes that this step will help publishers, including news agencies and media organizations, gain a stronger position when negotiating with Google on the terms of use of their content.
Back in January of this year, the UK government declared its intention to oblige Google to introduce an opt-out mechanism to ensure fairer terms of interaction for content authors, especially news companies, as the CMA stated at the time. In March, Google responded to these demands by promising to create appropriate updates that would allow websites to purposefully block their own presence in the search engine’s generative AI functions.
In addition to the aforementioned toggle, the tech giant announced the launch of new analytical tools in the Search Console. They are designed to provide website administrators with statistics and more detailed information on which pages of their resources are included in AI responses and in which geographic regions this happens. Google noted that it continues to interact with website owners to find out what kind of analytics will be most effective for adjusting their strategies, so the number of available metrics will only increase over time.
Representatives of the company assured that Google is closely analyzing feedback from publishers and authors, and is also working closely with regulators, including the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, to provide site owners with the right tools as user preferences transform. This announcement comes just a few weeks after the I/O 2026 developer conference, where Google unveiled an innovative dynamic search bar. This interface is capable of increasing its size to handle complex queries, and can also accept video files, pictures, documents, and even open Chrome browser tabs as input. The demonstrations provoked a huge number of publications, the authors of which prematurely stated the final death of traditional Google search in its usual form.
Even if such predictions turned out to be hasty, dissatisfaction with Google on the part of media companies, whose materials actually fill the databases for the search engine’s AI functions, continues to grow rapidly. These sentiments were most clearly demonstrated in a recent interview with Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, for TBPN. The top manager shared that last year he instructed his subordinates to work as if search engines did not exist at all in order to stimulate their own page views and increase profits. He later clarified that Condé Nast does not expect search traffic to completely disappear to zero, but he predicts that in the future, transitions from Google will provide only a single-digit percentage of the total traffic.
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