The news: Google is testing a Search Console toggle that lets publishers and website owners exclude their domains from AI Overviews and AI Mode—after UK regulators compelled the move.

“With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in…AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover. Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features,” Google wrote in a blog post. Opting out carries zero ranking penalty in standard search results, making it a low-risk lever for publishers testing AI traffic value against direct referral loss.

Google said it is engaging with regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), and will test the feature with a subset of UK publishers for testing “before rolling them out to website owners globally,” Google pointed out in its post. AI Overviews are available in 100 markets.

The announcement came with new Search features, including an increase in the number of inline links within responses, a preferred sources setting for users to choose preferred websites, and guidance for website owners to improve visibility in genAI search. New Search Console metrics will quantify exactly how much traffic AI features generate, which publishers can use in content licensing negotiations.

Why it’s worth watching: Regulatory pressure is rewriting the rules of generative search. The CMA estimates that Google owns a 90% share of the search market, and its AI features’ negative impact on publisher traffic has prompted it to respond.

• An April 2025 Ahrefs study found that the presence of an AI Overview in search results led to a 34.5% lower clickthrough rate for top-ranking pages. “The clickthrough rate for searches that have AI Overviews is about 60% to 70% lower,” Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar told the BBC last month.
• Major publishers like Condé Nast are already planning for single-digit Google referral percentages, per Search engine Land; this toggle accelerates how quickly brands must build non-search acquisition channels.

Implications for brands: Opting out of AI Overviews gives publishers negotiation leverage for content licensing deals and exclusives. Opting out also lessens brand exposure from AI rewriting search headlines and obscuring brand voice. But with AI Overviews commanding the most valuable real estate on results pages, publishers and brands may not feel traffic improvements from toggling off.

This content is part of EMARKETER’s subscription Briefings, where we pair daily updates with data and analysis from forecasts and research reports. Our Briefings prepare you to start your day informed, to provide critical insights in an important meeting, and to understand the context of what’s happening in your industry. Non-clients can click here to get a demo of our full platform and coverage.