For two years the honest answer to “how do I stay out of AI Overviews” was that you could not, not without paying for it somewhere else. The only lever was nosnippet, which took your ordinary search snippet away at the same time, and most people decided that cure was worse.
That changed on 3 June 2026, and a lot of the advice online has not caught up. There is now a property-level setting in Search Console that excludes your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s generative features, and Google says it “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal”. This post is about that control, what it does and does not cover, and the two older methods that are still widely recommended for a job neither of them does.
Where the setting is
Search Console, Settings, then Search generative AI. It applies at the property level, and it inherits: set it on a domain property and it covers the subdomains and paths beneath it, which is worth knowing before you flip it on a property that covers more than you meant.
Google puts the effect as excluding your content “from appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Discover”. Changes take one to two days to take effect. Your pages stay in the index, keep their rankings, and keep their normal blue-link snippets.
The scale it opts you out of, from Google’s own announcement: AI Overviews reached 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode passed 1 billion. Whatever you decide, decide it deliberately rather than by leaving a default alone.
Does blocking Google-Extended keep you out of AI Overviews?
No, and this is the most common wrong answer in circulation. AIOSEO, among others, still lists blocking Google-Extended as a way to opt out of AI Overviews.
Google’s crawler documentation describes Google-Extended as a control token, not a crawler, used to manage whether your content helps improve Gemini apps and grounds Gemini responses, and it says the token “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search”.
Read what that page does not say, because that is the actual finding. It never mentions AI Overviews. It never mentions AI Mode. A page whose entire job is to explain what Google-Extended controls declines to claim it controls either surface, and the reason is that AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on Google Search’s index, fetched by Googlebot, not by anything Google-Extended governs.
So a User-agent: Google-Extended / Disallow: / block in your robots.txt does something real, but it is not this. If you want the longer version of what that token is for, Google-Extended in robots.txt covers it, and it sits alongside the same question for ChatGPT’s crawler, which is a different control again.
What nosnippet does, and why it is now the fallback
nosnippet still works, and Google’s robots meta tag documentation confirms it reaches these surfaces. It is just a blunter instrument than the setting, because it removes your ordinary text snippet, your video preview and your appearance in AI-generated results all at once. Before June 2026 that was the whole menu. Now it is what you reach for when you need something the property-level setting cannot do.
Two cases where it still earns its place:
- Page-level, not property-level. The Search Console control is all or nothing for a property. If you want one section of the site out and the rest in,
nosnippetin the page’s<head>is how, or the X-Robots-Tag header if you are doing it at the server for non-HTML files. - Part of a page.
data-nosnippetmarks a passage rather than a document. Worth knowing: Google only honours it onspan,divandsectionelements. Put it on a paragraph or a list item and it does nothing, which is a silent failure I have watched people ship.
There is also max-snippet:[number], which caps snippet length in characters rather than removing it. Setting a low cap limits how much of a page can be shown, though I would not rely on it as a partial opt-out. It is a length limit, not a surface control.
None of these are a robots.txt job. Blocking the crawl means Google never reads the meta tag, so you get the worst of both: no snippet control and no crawl, which is exactly the trap noindex versus robots.txt exists to explain.
Should you actually do this?
Mostly no, and I say that as someone who is not especially enthusiastic about AI Overviews.
The case for opting out is narrow and real: content you license rather than give away, subscription material where the answer is the product, and anything where being summarised destroys the reason to visit. If you sell the answer, having it read aloud in the results is a business problem, not an SEO one.
The case against is that you are giving up presence on a surface with 2.5 billion monthly users while your competitors stay on it, and you cannot A/B this. It is a property-level switch with a one-to-two-day lag in each direction, so measuring the effect means running your site one way for a month and the other way for a month, which is not a clean experiment.
If you are opting out because AI Overviews are eating your clicks, check whether they are first. Search Console splits AI Mode into its own reporting now, and reading AI Mode traffic in Search Console is a better starting point than a switch you cannot easily reverse-test. My longer view on whether any of this deserves your attention is in do I need to optimize for AI Overviews, and it has not changed because a setting appeared.
What I check first
When a site owner tells me their content is turning up in AI Overviews and they want it out, or the reverse, that their snippets have vanished and they do not know why, I check the same two places in the same order, and it is almost always one of them.
First, the property-level setting, because it inherits. Someone sets it on the domain property to keep a paywalled section out, and takes the entire site off the surface without realising the subdomains came with it. Nothing in the Performance report announces this. You have to go look at the settings screen.
Second, robots.txt, for a Google-Extended block added by someone who believed it was doing this job. That line is not causing the symptom, which is precisely why it wastes time: it looks like an explanation, it is sitting right there, and removing it changes nothing. Rule it out early rather than late.
The thing I would genuinely warn against is treating the June setting as a fix for a traffic decline. It is a presence control. If clicks are down, the cause is upstream of it, and switching this on removes a surface without addressing whatever moved.
If you want the opposite outcome, the controls above are exactly what not to use. AI search visibility covers the other direction: being read, quoted and cited on purpose.
One more directive gets reached for here and does nothing at Google. The noarchive rule is now ignored by Google Search, though Bing has given it a second life as a generative AI opt-out, so leaving it on your pages is a Microsoft setting rather than a Google one.
Sources
- Google Search Console Help, Manage how your site appears in Google’s generative AI features, for the setting’s location, the surfaces it covers, property inheritance, the one to two day window, and the statement that it “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal”, checked 5 September 2026
- The Keyword (Google’s blog), New controls for website owners, published 3 June 2026 and updated 31 August 2026, for the announcement and the 2.5 billion AI Overviews and 1 billion AI Mode user figures, checked 5 September 2026
- Google Search Central, Google crawlers and user-triggered fetchers, for the description of Google-Extended as a Gemini training and grounding control and the statement that it “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search”, checked 5 September 2026
- Google Search Central, Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag, for nosnippet applying to AI Overviews and AI Mode, max-snippet, and data-nosnippet being honoured only on span, div and section elements, checked 5 September 2026
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website, for how AI Overviews and AI Mode source content from Google Search, checked 5 September 2026
- First-hand: the two-place diagnostic above comes from client Search Console properties I hold access to, where a Google-Extended robots.txt line added in the belief that it controlled AI Overviews is the most common thing I remove