Google lets U.K. publishers opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode results

August 31, 2026 · mediapost.com

Google will roll out the opt-out control first to a small group of U.K. publishers before it expands worldwide, Mrinalini Loew, general manager of Google's Search Ecosystem, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. The tool lives inside Search Console and removes a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode, the AI-generated summaries Google places above its traditional search results. Google paired the update with more inline links and website previews inside those summaries, which reach over 2.5 billion monthly users for AI Overviews and more than one billion for AI Mode. Panmure Liberum, in a research note issued Thursday, called the move "positive for all publishers and particularly owners of proprietary content."

Campaigns built around programmatic buys placed next to premium publisher content will see that inventory shift as sites weigh whether AI Overviews citations are worth losing referral traffic entirely. Attribution and reach models that count on search-driven visits now need a variable for publishers who disappear from AI-generated answers altogether, since those pageviews and ad impressions simply will not exist once a site opts out. The CMA has said it will track how Google applies the rule and can order further changes if the opt-out fails to give publishers real bargaining power.