Can you keep your pages out of Google’s AI Overviews? As of June 2026, yes — Google Search Console has a real, per-property opt-out. But it’s narrower than “keep my content out of Google’s AI,” and merchants deciding whether to flip it should know exactly what it does and doesn’t cover before they do.

What shipped

Google added a new Search generative AI control to Search Console under Settings, with three states — Include, Exclude, or Inherit from a parent property — according to Google’s own Search Console Help page. Setting a property to Exclude removes it from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover: it can no longer appear in those features or help ground their answers. Include, the default, leaves you eligible.

Google is explicit that the control has no effect on regular Search or Discover rankings — it’s scoped only to the generative-AI surfaces (blog.google, “New opportunities, control and insights for website owners”). Google also shipped a companion Generative AI performance report the same day, breaking out impressions in AI Overviews/AI Mode by page, country and device — though notably with no click data, unlike the standard Performance report (Google Search Central Blog).

Why now: a regulator forced it

This wasn’t a routine product launch. On June 3, 2026, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority issued a legally binding Conduct Requirement — under the powers it gained when it designated Google as holding Strategic Market Status in general search — ordering Google to give publishers a genuine opt-out from AI Overviews and AI Mode (TechCrunch; GOV.UK, CMA press release). Google shipped the Search Console toggle the same day. The CMA gave Google nine months to fully comply, with page-level (not just property-level) granularity required by March 2027 — the current control is a first, coarser step.

The rollout itself has been slow. It launched to a subset of UK properties only and stayed there for over a month. By mid-July, SEOs began reporting access on US, India and Switzerland properties, with Google’s John Mueller confirming on Bluesky that Google is “rolling these out incrementally to sites, and reviewing the feedback along the way” — no fixed date for full global availability (Search Engine Roundtable). If you don’t see the setting in Search Console yet, that’s expected, not a bug.

The gap: Gemini isn’t covered

The control’s biggest limitation is easy to miss. Excluding a property from AI Overviews and AI Mode does not stop that content from being summarized inside the standalone Gemini app — it’s a Search-surface-specific switch, not a “keep my content out of every Google AI product” control (TechTimes). A merchant who opts out and assumes they’re now invisible to Google’s AI stack entirely would be wrong.

What this means for a merchant

For most stores, opting out is the wrong default — AI Overviews and AI Mode are a discovery channel, and excluding yourself trades a real (if hard-to-measure) source of visibility for a control most competitors haven’t touched yet. The setting is worth knowing about for a different reason: it’s a new deliberate-choice checkpoint. “Include” is the default, so any site currently excluded got there through a specific decision, not an accident, and that’s worth auditing alongside other access signals — we covered a related one, Google-Agent’s robots.txt bypass, in an earlier piece.

None of this changes whether an agent that does reach your page can actually buy something there. Getting surfaced in AI Overviews is a discovery problem; whether the agent can then read your price, check stock, and complete checkout is a transaction problem — and that’s the layer AgentReady’s scan audits.

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