Should You Exclude Your Site From Google’s AI Features?

Every Search Console property now has a switch that did not exist a year ago, and a lot of site owners found it before they found anything explaining it. Google’s Search generative AI control documentation states the rollout in its own words: “as of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out this control to all websites worldwide.” It lives under Settings, then Search generative AI, and it offers three options.

What the control actually governs

The three options are to include your site’s links and content in Search generative AI features, to exclude them, or to inherit the control from a parent property. Include is the default, so a site that has never opened the setting is included.

The scope is narrower than the name suggests. The control covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Google Discover. It does not cover anything else that might reasonably be called AI in search, and it does not reach other companies’ systems at all. A site that excludes itself here is still crawlable by every other AI company’s bot, which is a separate decision with a separate mechanism, set out in a decision framework for blocking AI crawlers.

What Google says it does not do

Three disclaimers in the documentation are load-bearing, and they are the reason this setting is less frightening than it first appears.

• It “doesn’t affect ranking or inclusion” in ordinary Search results. Google’s announcement of the new controls for website owners repeats the point: “this control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features.”
• It “doesn’t affect AI training”. Training is governed by crawler-level controls, not by this setting.
• It “doesn’t override publishers’ other choices” in services such as Merchant Center, so a retailer’s product data is governed by its own settings rather than by this one.

Taken together, those say the control is a surface-level inclusion decision and nothing more. It is not a penalty, it is not a signal, and setting it does not tell Google anything about the quality of your site.

What you give up by excluding

Google is equally direct about the cost. The announcement states that “sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features”, and the help documentation adds that excluded content cannot be visible to users in those features or used as an input to generate a response.

That second clause is the one people underestimate. Exclusion is not a licensing position in which your content is used but uncredited. It is removal: your pages stop being a source, and the links that would have pointed back to them stop appearing. Whatever share of your visibility currently sits inside an AI Overview or AI Mode answer goes to zero, and the citation traffic goes with it.

The cases where excluding is defensible

There is a real set, and it is small. A site whose content is time-sensitive in a way that makes a summarised version actively misleading — live pricing, medical dosing, legal status that changes by jurisdiction — has a defensible argument that a generated paraphrase is a liability rather than a marketing channel. So does a publisher with a contractual obligation about where its content may be surfaced, or one running a subscription model where the whole product is the article and a summary substitutes for it directly.

Those are not hypotheticals, but they are specific, and each involves a harm beyond “fewer clicks”. Fewer clicks is the ordinary condition described in what’s happening to organic traffic, and excluding yourself from a surface does not recover the clicks it was taking — it removes the remainder.

Measure before you touch it

The strongest argument for leaving the setting alone is that, for the first time, there is data. Search Console’s generative AI performance reporting became available to all sites on the same date this control did, and it exposes impressions by page, country, device and date. That is enough to answer the only question that should drive the decision: how much of your site is appearing in these features at all, and which templates.

Run that report for a full quarter before making an irreversible-feeling change. Most sites will find a smaller number than they expected, which turns an anxious decision into a rounding error. Sites that find a large number have learned that the surface matters to them, which is an argument for staying in it rather than leaving. Either way the sequence is the same, and it is the one recommended in what Google’s own AI optimization guide says: measure the surface before you legislate about it.