Google will now let you leave AI Overviews. It will not tell you what leaving costs you.

There is a new setting in Google Search Console. It is under Settings, it is called Search generative AI, and it has exactly two positions: include your site’s links and content in Google’s generative AI features, or exclude them.

Excluding means your pages stop appearing in AI Overviews, in AI Mode, and in Discover’s generative AI features. Google is unusually blunt about the consequence. From its announcement: “Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.”

Plenty of people have wanted this switch for two years. Now that it exists, the interesting question is not whether you can flip it. It is whether you could possibly know if you should.

Where the switch came from

This is not a feature Google woke up wanting to ship. It is a regulatory obligation, and knowing that explains most of its shape.

On 3 June 2026, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed a publisher conduct requirement on Google’s general search services, using the powers it gained when it designated Google as having strategic market status. The requirement obliges Google to give publishers effective controls over how their search content is used in generative AI, to publish clear information about that use, to provide detailed metrics on user engagement with their content in generative AI features, and to attribute content clearly and accurately. Following consultation, it also covers opting out of having content used for fine-tuning AI models. Google has nine months from that date to implement everything, which puts the outer deadline in early March 2027, and it must publish compliance reports every six months for the first year. Two weeks later, on 17 June 2026, the CMA imposed further conduct requirements on fair ranking and data portability.

On the same day the publisher requirement landed, Google announced the Search Console control and a set of new generative AI performance reports. The rollout began with “a subset of website owners in the UK” and has been widening since, which is why some properties have the setting today and others do not.

So the geography is a clue and the sequencing is a clue. This is a UK competition remedy that Google is rolling out globally rather than maintaining two versions of Search Console. If you are running a business in Toronto, you are getting a control designed for the concerns of British newspapers.

What the toggle actually does

The precise boundaries matter here more than usual, because three different things get confused with each other constantly.

It governs appearance in generative AI features on Search. AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features in Discover. Opt out and your content will not appear as links in those surfaces and will not be used to ground the answers in them.

It does not touch normal Search. Google states plainly that the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search. Your rankings, your indexing, and your ordinary result snippets are unaffected. This is the genuinely new part. Before this, the only levers were nosnippet and max-snippet, which do suppress AI features but suppress your regular search snippets at the same time, because as far as Google is concerned AI features are part of Search. That was an all-or-nothing trade nobody sane accepted.

It is not the AI training control. Training of Google’s other AI products is governed by the separate Google-Extended crawler directive in your robots.txt. Different mechanism, different question, and worth keeping straight when someone tells you they “blocked Google’s AI.”

Two more practical constraints. The control is property-wide: you cannot exclude your blog and keep your service pages. Page-level controls are the part of the CMA requirement Google has until March 2027 to deliver. And changes take effect in what Google calls generally a few days, sometimes longer because of caching, so this is not a switch you flip on Monday and measure on Tuesday.

The number they did not give you

Now the part that decides everything.

Alongside the toggle, Google shipped a generative AI performance report in Search Console. It shows impressions. How your impressions in generative AI features change over time, which pages get the most and fewest, and where they come from by country and device.

It does not show clicks. It does not show click-through rate. It does not show average position. It excludes Search Labs experiments, Discover has its own separate report, and it inherits the usual Performance report limits including the 1,000-row cap.

Hold that next to the decision you are being asked to make. Opting out costs you whatever traffic those features currently send. The report tells you how often you appeared and says nothing at all about how often anyone clicked.

It gets slightly worse. Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode have always been folded into the totals in your main Performance report, under the Web search type, without being broken out. So you cannot derive the missing number by subtraction either. There is no before and after to compare, because the before was never separable.

The CMA noticed. Its interpretive notes ask Google for click-throughs to the publisher’s site from links inside generative AI features and for click-through rate, defined as the percentage of users who click a link to that publisher within a generative AI feature, delivered separately from organic search through an accessible platform. Google has said it will add more metrics over time. As of this week it has not, and the nine-month clock runs to March 2027.

That is the actual state of play: an exit door, no meter on it, and a regulator’s deadline seven months out for the meter.

Is AI search really taking your traffic?

The honest answer is that it depends enormously on what kind of site you run, and most of the alarming numbers you have read describe someone else’s site.

The best recent measurement of the aggregate is SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data, published 9 June 2026, covering US Google searches from January through April 2026. It found that 68.01% of searches ended without a click, up from 60.45% in 2024. That is a real and meaningful shift, and it is the single most-quoted figure in this argument.

Pew Research Center’s browsing-panel study, published in July 2025 from March 2025 data on 900 US adults, found the sharper version of the same effect: users clicked a search result on 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, versus 15% where none did, and clicked a link inside the summary itself on just 1% of those visits.

And then there is the number almost nobody quotes. In that same SparkToro dataset, 0.34% of searches transitioned into AI Mode. A third of one percent. Google has said AI Mode passed a billion monthly users with query volume roughly doubling every quarter, and both things can be true: a very large number of people have tried it, while the overwhelming majority of actual searches still run through the ordinary results page.

So the traffic pressure is real, it is concentrated in informational queries where a summary genuinely substitutes for the visit, and the specific surface everyone is panicking about is still a rounding error in search volume. Those three facts belong in the same sentence and they almost never are.

Why a small business should leave the switch alone

For a publisher, the case for opting out is coherent even if you disagree with it. Their product is the pageview. The advertising revenue attaches to the visit. An AI answer that satisfies the reader without the visit is a direct substitution of their revenue, and the strategic question is whether being cited without being visited is worth anything at all.

A small business is not in that position, and the difference is not a matter of degree.

You monetize the customer, not the pageview. If someone asks Google’s AI which studio in Toronto builds custom booking systems and the answer names you with a link, that is a good outcome whether or not the click happens immediately. The AI answer is functioning as a referral, which is closer to a recommendation from an accountant than to a lost ad impression. Opting out removes you from the recommendation and returns you nothing.

Your money queries are the ones least affected. Zero-click growth is heaviest in informational search. The queries that actually produce revenue for a local service business are local, navigational, and transactional: your name plus reviews, a service plus a neighbourhood, hours, quotes, booking. Those still resolve to a click, a call, or a direction request, and the map pack still does most of that work. What we cover in local SEO for a Toronto small business has not been displaced by any of this.

You cannot run the experiment. This is the decisive one. To justify opting out you would need to know the clicks you are giving up, and that is precisely the number Search Console withholds. If you flip the switch, your total clicks may fall and you will have no way to attribute the fall to the change rather than to seasonality, a competitor, or the next core update. You will have made an irreversible-feeling decision on a metric you cannot see, and the only way back is to flip it again and wait several more days for caching to clear.

And a smaller point that is easy to miss. Google says it has increased the number of inline links inside AI responses to drive click-through. If that trend continues, the value of appearing in these surfaces goes up over time, and an opt-out set in 2026 is a decision made against 2026 link density that quietly persists.

Where opting out is genuinely worth considering: you are a publisher whose revenue is advertising against informational content, you are in or preparing for a content licensing negotiation, or your content itself is the product and being summarized destroys the reason to visit. If that is you, the honest advice is still to wait for click data and page-level control unless you have a legal or commercial reason not to, because both are due inside the next seven months.

What to do instead, according to Google

There is now an official answer to “how do I show up in AI results,” and it is worth reading precisely because it is so deflationary. Google’s guide to optimizing for generative AI features, last updated 10 July 2026, says the following:

• You do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown. It names llms.txt specifically.
• Structured data is not required for generative AI search, and there is no special schema.org markup to add.
• You do not need to chunk your content into small pieces. Google handles pages covering several topics.
• You do not need to write in a particular way for generative AI, or make a page per query variation, or chase mentions across the web.
• What does matter: unique content with a real perspective rather than commodity content that recycles what everyone else has said, pages that are indexable and technically sound, semantic HTML, good page experience, and for commerce and local, Merchant Center and a properly maintained Business Profile.

We should be straight about the implications for our own advice. We publish an llms.txt on this site and we have recommended structured data as high-leverage for AI visibility. Google’s position is that neither is required for its generative AI features. Structured data remains worth having for rich results and for the many non-Google systems that read it, and our llms.txt costs nothing to maintain, but neither is a lever on AI Overviews and anyone selling you one as an AI-search package is selling you nothing. We have gone back and corrected the pillar piece and the checklist accordingly.

The rest of the guidance describes an ordinary well-built site, which is the same conclusion the March 2026 core update pointed at from a different direction.

The ten-minute version

1. Open Search Console, go to Settings, and look for Search generative AI. If it is there, confirm it is set to include. Include is the default, so unless someone changed it you are fine. If the setting is not there yet, you are outside the rollout and there is nothing to do.
2. Check who else can turn this off. If an agency, a former developer, or a marketing contractor has owner access to your property, they can flip this. Open Settings, then Users and permissions, and remove anyone who should not be there. This is worth doing today regardless of AI.
3. Look at the generative AI performance report if you have one. Read it as a visibility signal, not a traffic report. Rising impressions mean you are being surfaced more; they do not mean more visits.
4. Verify nothing at your edge is blocking the crawlers. All of the above assumes Google can fetch your pages. Cloudflare is changing its AI bot controls on 15 September 2026 in a way that can block Googlebot as collateral, which we covered in the write-up on the Cloudflare change. Check it before that date.
5. Do not add nosnippet as a substitute. It will suppress your ordinary search snippets too. If you want out of AI features specifically, the new control is the only tool that does that cleanly.

The bit worth remembering

The Search Console toggle is a real improvement over the choices site owners had a year ago, and it exists because a regulator required it rather than because the market produced it. That is worth noticing on its own.

But a control without a measurement is not really a choice. Until Google ships click-through data and page-level granularity, the honest position for almost every business that is not a publisher is that this switch is a distraction from the work that actually moves the number, which is being the kind of specific, first-hand, verifiable source that both a search algorithm and a language model have a reason to cite.

If you want to know whether your site is currently visible in AI answers for the questions your customers actually ask, and what is holding it back, send us the URL. It is a short audit and it is a much better use of an afternoon than a toggle you cannot measure.