Foundations

Google will let you switch off AI Overviews. For a B2B firm, that is the wrong lever.

By Arnav Mukherjee, founder of TofuBofu · August 29, 2026

This category keeps repeating a line that was never true: that you cannot leave Google's AI Overviews without leaving Google search. We published it ourselves, on our own crawlers page. Checking it takes two minutes in Google's robots documentation, where the nosnippet rule says it will "prevent the content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode", and has never deindexed anybody.

So the exit already existed. It was just expensive, because nosnippet takes your snippets and descriptions everywhere else in Google at the same time, and it is set one page at a time. What Google shipped is not a new door. It is a cheaper one. Search Console now carries a Search generative AI control that excludes a whole property from the AI features and leaves your ordinary snippets intact.

The more useful question is what the switch is worth to you, and here the entire public conversation is unhelpful, because it was written by and for publishers. A newspaper and a managed IT provider are in opposite positions in front of this toggle. Almost everything you will read assumes you are the newspaper.

What the control actually does, in Google's words

The setting lives in Search Console under Settings, as the Search generative AI control. Google's documentation is unusually plain about the consequences, so it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing.

On what exclusion removes: "links to your site and your site's content won't appear in Search generative AI features", and that content crawled from your site "won't be eligible to be used as an input to generate an AI response or preview". Notice that those are two separate losses. One is the link that might have sent you a visitor. The other is the grounding that lets the engine describe you correctly. An engine that can no longer read you does not go quiet about you. It answers from whatever else it has, which is other people's pages about your category.

On the blast radius, which is the sentence that makes the control interesting at all: the setting "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search". Compare that with the old lever. Google's nosnippet rule applies, in its own words, "to all forms of search results (at Google: web search, Google Images, Discover, AI Overviews, AI Mode)", so buying your way out of the AI answer also cost you the text under every ordinary result. The new control is narrower on purpose. That is the whole change, and it is a change in price, not in possibility.

On scope, Google names three surfaces: AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Google Discover, with the standing caveat that it expects "to update this list over time as we develop Google Search". Read that as current rather than settled.

On granularity, it is a property-level control and it inherits: "by default, a property inherits its Search generative AI control from its closest parent that has changed its control to stop inheriting". Search Console properties can be a domain, a subdomain or a URL prefix, so a URL prefix is the finest cut anyone can make today. You cannot exclude one article and keep the article beside it.

And on availability, before anyone builds a plan on it: Google says it is "rolling out this control to a subset of website owners, allowing for thorough testing before rolling it out further". Go and look in your own Search Console rather than assuming the toggle is there.

The switch was built for a business model you probably do not have

Publishers campaigned for this control and they were right to. When your article is the product, an AI answer that satisfies the reader on Google's results page is not a marketing impression, it is a substituted sale. The reader got the thing you sell, on somebody else's property, wrapped in somebody else's advertising. Whatever you think of the economics, the grievance is coherent.

Now apply that to a cybersecurity firm, an MSP, an accounting practice or a B2B software company. The logic inverts completely. Your pages are not the inventory. They are the marketing for the inventory, and the inventory is a contract. A buyer who reads a paragraph about you inside an AI answer and never clicks through has not consumed your product. They have learned that you exist and been handed a reason to shortlist you, which is the outcome you were spending money to produce.

This is the whole reason we argue that SEO is the floor and answer engine optimisation is a distinct layer above it. Google's own documentation makes the dependency explicit: its generative AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems". The AI surfaces are fed by the index you already do the work to be in. Opting out means paying for the SEO and then declining the surface it feeds.

And the direction of buyer behaviour is not ambiguous. G2 surveyed 1,076 B2B software buyers in March 2026 and found that 51% now begin their software research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google. That figure is about chatbots specifically, and G2's same report notes that 80% still use Google somewhere in the journey, so it is not a story about Google dying. It is a story about the first impression moving into a machine-written summary. Choosing that moment to remove yourself from one of those summaries is a strange piece of timing.

You would be switching off the most generous surface we can measure

This is where we can add something the commentary cannot, because we keep the answers. On 27 August we counted every source link in our own stored AI answers: 882 distinct sources across 55 completed scans and 3,031 answer cells, run between 24 June and 24 August 2026.

Two caveats travel with every number in that count, and they are not footnotes. First, it describes two engines and not six: Google AI Mode and Bing Copilot both return a reference list attached to the answer, and ChatGPT returns inline links once it searches, while Claude returns its citations as structured data beside the answer and Perplexity returns a separate source list, neither of which our stored answer text carries, and Gemini is queried with no search tool at all. Their totals here would measure our instrument rather than their behaviour. Second, the sample is small and lumpy. Eleven of the 55 scans produced a citation at all, across seven brands, and four of those scans supply 95.8% of the sources while one supplies 54.2%. Every one of those companies ran a scan because it already suspected it was missing from AI answers, which is a sample selected on the problem being measured.

With that stated, here is the finding that bears directly on this decision. Google AI Mode cited 20 distinct sources per answer. Bing Copilot cited 2.5, with a median of 3 among the answers that cited anything. Same scans, same buying questions, an eight-fold difference in how many links the answer hands out.

Of the surfaces we can actually watch cite, Google's AI Mode is by a wide margin the most generous with links. It is the one that most often has room for a firm that is not the obvious market leader. And it is precisely what the toggle switches off.

One more number, for scale. Of those 882 sources, 14 pointed at the domain of the company being scanned. That is 1.6%, on a sample selected on the problem, so read it as a floor rather than an industry average. Getting cited at all is already rare. Opting out is spending down something most firms in our data do not yet have.

The toggle is Google-only, and your buyers are not

Here is the framing error underneath most of the coverage. People are calling this an AI opt-out. It is not. It is a Google Search opt-out that happens to cover Google's AI features.

We query six engines. The toggle reaches exactly one of them, AI Mode, because Google's scope list names three features "on Google Search" and AI Mode is the only one of the six that is a Google Search surface. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Bing Copilot and Gemini each answer on their own terms, under their own crawler rules, and a setting in Search Console reaches none of them. Flip it and you have not withdrawn from AI. You have withdrawn from one vendor's answers while five other engines carry on answering the same buying questions, with your competitors in them and you absent.

If your actual worry is AI systems consuming your content generally, this control is not the instrument, and reaching for it will leave you with the costs of a decision you did not really make. That is a crawler-level conversation, and a different one.

The order of operations, if you are genuinely considering it

Check whether you have the control before planning around it. Google is rolling it out to a subset of properties. A strategy built on a toggle that is not in your account is a meeting, not a plan.

Establish the baseline, and know what it cannot tell you. Search Console's generative AI performance report groups impressions by page, country, date and device, and carries no click data in its current form. So the instrument counts appearances while the decision is about what those appearances are worth. If that is your only measurement, you are not yet equipped to make the trade, and the honest move is to say so rather than to guess in whichever direction feels safer.

Apply the publisher test. One question decides most of these cases. Is the page itself the product, or is the page the marketing for a product you sell elsewhere? If somebody reading your page without ever contacting you is a completed transaction, you have a real case to consider. If that reader is a wasted impression unless they get in touch, the AI answer is doing your job for you.

Remember the blast radius is a whole property. The finest cut available is a URL-prefix property. If the complaint is one section of a site, scope it there and leave the rest. If the complaint is one page, this control is the wrong size of tool.

Then check you have the problem at all. This is the part I would push hardest. In our own data the overwhelmingly common condition among B2B firms is not being over-summarised in AI answers. It is being absent from them. Firms arrive at us worried about the wrong end of this: the engine is not taking their traffic, it is recommending somebody else and never mentioning them. A switch that removes you from an answer is not much use when the answer never named you.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Google Search Console Help: Search generative AI control: the setting itself, the three surfaces it covers, the property-level inheritance rule, and the statement that it is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal elsewhere in Search. Read at source on 29 August 2026.
• Google Search Central: Robots meta tag specifications: the nosnippet rule, which applies "to all forms of search results (at Google: web search, Google Images, Discover, AI Overviews, AI Mode)" and prevents content "from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode". The pre-existing exit, and the reason this control is a change in price rather than in possibility. Read at source on 29 August 2026.
• Google Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report (Search): impressions only, grouped by page, country, date and device, with no clicks, no CTR and no query dimension. Read at source on 29 August 2026.
• Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search: the sentence that bounds the whole decision, that Google's generative AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems.
• G2, The Answer Economy: 2026 AI Search Insight Report: 51% of B2B software buyers now begin research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, from 1,076 respondents surveyed in March 2026. The same report notes 80% still use Google somewhere in the journey.
• TofuBofu scan database, 55 completed scans between 24 June and 24 August 2026, 3,031 answer cells, 882 distinct sources recovered from stored answer text. Recounted 27 August 2026. The count describes Google AI Mode and Bing Copilot only, eleven scans across seven brands produced citations, and four of them supply 95.8% of the sources. A sample selected on the problem being measured.

Related reading

• AI crawlers explained: who is reading your site and what each one does
• Your AI Mode questions are already in Search Console
• Which websites do AI engines actually cite? We counted 882 of them.