You can now opt out of Google's AI answers. Should you?

For the last couple of years the honest answer to "can I stay in Google but stay out of its AI answers?" was no. You could ask Google not to show a snippet, or ask it not to index the page at all, and every one of those levers cost you something in ordinary search results too. AI Overviews and AI Mode are features inside Google Search rather than separate products, and they draw on the same index as the blue links, so there was no clean way to be in one and out of the other. Plenty of people wrote that this was unfair. It was also simply how it worked.

That is no longer the position, and as of 31 August 2026 it is no longer the position anywhere in the world.

What actually changed

The setting is called the Search generative AI control and it lives under Settings in Google Search Console. It has three positions: include your site in Google's generative AI features, exclude it, or inherit whatever the parent property is set to. Include is the default. Google says a change takes effect within a day or two, though caching can stretch that.

Google introduced it in June 2026 and began rolling it out to a subset of UK site owners, saying it wanted to test properly before going worldwide. On 31 August it added a note to its own documentation confirming the control had reached all websites worldwide. If you looked for it in July and could not find it, look again.

The three things it does not do

This is where most of the confusion is going to sit, so it is worth being plain about the boundaries.

It does not affect your ordinary Google rankings. That is the entire point of it, and Google states it directly: the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search. There is also a regulatory backstop, which we will come to.

It does not stop Google training on your content. That is a different control with a confusingly similar reputation, Google-Extended, which governs whether your content can help train the models behind Gemini and be used for grounding in those products. Google's documentation is explicit that Google-Extended does not affect your inclusion in Search and is not a ranking signal. The two settings sit side by side and neither substitutes for the other.

It does nothing at all about the other engines. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot are not Google and do not read Google's settings. If your reason for wanting out is a general unease about AI, this switch addresses one engine and leaves the rest exactly as they were. Those are governed by crawler access instead, which is a separate five-minute check and a more common cause of an agency going unnamed.

Why Britain got it first

The interesting part of this story is not the switch, it is where it came from. On 3 June 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority imposed a binding conduct requirement on Google covering publishers. It requires Google to give publishers a workable way to withhold their content from the grounding of generative AI features, at directory level and then at page level. The notice sets periods rather than dates: six months from 3 June for the first, nine months for page level, which works out at early December 2026 and early March 2027. The CMA's own announcement put it as nine months to implement everything, with important parts expected to arrive well before that.

One clause in that notice deserves more attention than it has had. Google is required not to penalise publishers for using the controls, for example by downranking their content. That is the sort of assurance site owners have wanted for years and have never had in writing, and it exists because a British regulator wrote it down. The rest of the world has now inherited the result.

So should an estate agency use it?

Almost certainly not, and we would say that without much hesitation.

Think about who is on the other end of an AI answer that names your agency. Somebody has asked which agent to use in your town. They are not browsing. They are at the stage of narrowing a shortlist, and they are asking a machine because they do not yet know who to trust. An answer that includes you reaches that person at the moment they are deciding, and it costs you nothing to be there.

Opting out does not make that question stop being asked. It makes the answer be about somebody else.

The case for the other side, because there is one

The publishers who pushed for this control were not being unreasonable, and it is worth understanding why their position does not transfer to an estate agency.

A news site, a recipe site or a subscription publisher sells the visit. Their revenue is advertising or subscriptions on their own pages, so an AI answer that satisfies the reader without sending a click is a straightforward loss to them. The complaint is real and the control is a proportionate response to it.

An estate agency website does not work that way. You are not monetising page views. You are trying to be shortlisted, and a mention in an AI answer sits closer to a recommendation than to a lost visit. The two situations look similar from a distance and point in opposite directions.

The one case where an agency might reasonably reach for it is narrower: a specific page carrying information you would rather was not paraphrased at all. Page-level control is the part that does not arrive until next spring, so that is a decision to park rather than to make now.

What to actually do this week

Two things, and neither takes long.

Open Search Console and look at the setting. You are checking that it says include, which is the default, so for most agencies this will take thirty seconds and confirm nothing is wrong. The reason to look anyway is the inherit option: if your site sits under a parent property, or somebody set up a subdomain property at some point, the setting can end up somewhere you did not put it. This is the same class of problem as a bot blocking rule nobody remembers enabling.

Then leave it alone and spend the time on the question that actually matters, which is not whether you appear but what is said when you do. An answer that names your agency and describes it out of date, or attributes somebody else's reviews to you, is worse than not appearing at all. That comes down to what is on your site and what is on your Google Business Profile, and it is a content problem rather than a settings problem. We have written up the five reasons an agency goes unnamed, and none of them is this switch.

Where we land on it

A control that did not exist in June now exists everywhere, and it exists because a British regulator required it. That is worth knowing, and worth knowing before somebody sells you an opt-out as a service.

Our reading is that most agencies should look at the setting once, confirm it is on include, and never think about it again. The interesting work was never the switch. It is whether the answer, when it comes, is accurate, current, and about you.