Google adds AI Overviews opt-out few will use

Google's new opt-out toggle in Search Console, flagged this week by The Decoder, lets publishers exclude themselves from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Both features together already reach more than 3.5 billion monthly users. The choice on offer: keep appearing in the AI-generated answer that may cannibalise your clicks, or vanish from the surface where most search queries now resolve. Regulators forced the concession. Few will take it.

The mechanics matter. The toggle was prompted by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which has been circling Google over precisely this asymmetry: sites have been conscripted into training and grounding AI answers with no way to decline short of blocking Googlebot entirely, which also removes them from the blue links that still drive traffic. Google's fix decouples the two. New performance reports break out AI-surface impressions separately, so operators can finally see what AI Overviews are doing to their numbers before deciding whether to leave.

This is a concession designed to be declined. Opting out means surrendering visibility on the surface where queries increasingly terminate without a click. For a publisher whose business depends on referral traffic, that is not a choice; it is a threat dressed as a toggle. The CMA gets to claim a win on user agency. Google gets to point at the toggle the next time a regulator asks why publishers have no say. The underlying economics, in which Google synthesises third-party content into an answer that competes with the original, do not move.

For B2B brands the calculation runs the other way, and it is worth saying plainly. If you are a bank, an industrial group, a UN agency or a foundation, AI Overviews are not a tax on your traffic. They are a distribution channel for your authority. A citation inside an Overview puts your name in front of a procurement lead, a policy adviser or an analyst at the exact moment they are forming a view. The click that does not happen is the click you did not need. The brand impression you got is the one that determines whether you make the shortlist.

Which is why the new impressions report is the more useful half of this announcement. For the first time, marketing teams at large enterprises can see, inside Search Console, how often their pages surface inside AI answers as distinct from classic results. That is a measurement primitive the category has been missing. Expect the next twelve months of AI visibility work to be re-baselined against it, and expect vendors selling LLM-citation tracking to spend the summer explaining why their numbers diverge from Google's.

The opt-out will be taken up by a predictable subset: large news publishers with subscription models, a few legal and medical sites with liability concerns, and operators already suing Google or backing the CMA's case. For everyone else, including the multilaterals, financial institutions and industrial firms whose content tends to anchor Overviews on substantive queries, the rational move is to stay in and instrument harder. Track which pages get cited. Track which prompts trigger your inclusion. Treat AI Overview impressions as a brand metric, not a traffic one, and stop measuring success in sessions that were never going to arrive.