Intro
Google just shipped the first real opt-out for AI Overviews, and it lives inside the same screen you already use to check your search performance. On September 1, 2026, Barry Schwartz confirmed the global rollout of two connected features inside Google Search Console: a generative AI tab inside the Google Search Console AI performance report (opens in new tab), and a separate toggle that lets you block your content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the AI Overview variant inside Discover. The release followed a slow staged push that started in early June, then expanded region by region until every verified property was covered by August 31, 2026.
There are really only two things you need to know going in. The first is the reporting tab, which tells you how often your pages are surfacing inside AI answers. The second is the opt-out toggle, which is the first first-party switch Google has offered for AI use of your content. Until now, blocking AI ingestion meant indirect tricks like noindex, robots exclusions, or rate-limiting crawlers that may or may not have been respected. Now it is a checkbox wired into Google’s own pipeline, which is the part that actually matters for compliance.
Background
Google has been telegraphing this for months. The first announcements landed earlier in 2026, and the rollout expanded property by property until it hit global coverage. If you have been staring at your Performance report for weeks wondering where the tab is, do not panic and do not file a bug yet. Google has stated plainly that sites without enough data simply do not get the report yet, which is the most common reason for a missing tab.
It is worth being clear about what this is not. It is not the old noindex workaround people rushed to during the early AI Overview backlash in 2024 and 2025. It is not a robots.txt directive either. It is a control that sits inside Search Console itself, which means Google is acknowledging the request at the indexing and serving layer rather than relying on the indirect signals that some publishers used before. For a content owner who has been frustrated that their opt-out attempts were treated as suggestions, that distinction is the whole story.
What’s happening now
Inside Search Console, open the Performance report and look for the new expandable section near the top of the chart. The view adds an “AI” filter that splits impressions between classic search and generative AI surfaces, then expands into its own panel. The data you get is deliberately narrow. You see how many impressions your URLs generated inside AI features, which specific URLs appeared, a country breakdown, a device split for Search, and a date range that goes down to hourly granularity. That is useful, but it is also the limit.
There are two notable omissions. There are no click numbers, because Google has not worked out how to attribute clicks inside an AI answer yet, and there are no query strings, which means you cannot tell which prompts triggered your pages. You can see that your pricing guide showed up in an AI Overview 4,200 times last week, but you cannot see whether those came from “best cPanel alternatives” or “how to migrate from shared hosting.” That is a real gap if you want to learn anything topical from the report.
The opt-out toggle lives a few clicks away, in the AI-specific settings panel rather than the main Performance view. Flipping it blocks your pages from being used as links inside AI Overviews, as grounding material for the answer itself, and inside the AI Overview variant of Discover. The wording in Google’s help document is broad, which I will come back to in a moment.
How do I opt my site out of AI Overviews in Google Search Console?
Open Search Console and head to the Performance report for the property you want to control. If the generative AI section is missing, double-check that you are viewing a domain-level property rather than only a URL prefix, because prefix properties sometimes lag on new tabs and that catches people out. Once the section is visible, click into the AI settings panel and look for the toggle that controls whether your pages can appear inside AI features. Flip it to the off position and save.
Do not treat the save as the end of the process. Reload the page, confirm the toggle state has stuck, and then plan for a delay. Google’s crawler has to re-process the property before the change takes effect on the serving side, so do not expect zero impressions the next morning. The honest expectation is that AI impressions decay over the next reporting cycle rather than dropping on a single day. After one full cycle, go back to the Performance report and compare your AI impressions against a screenshot of the baseline you took before flipping the switch. If the line is still flat, something did not take.
This is the part where a concrete example helps. Imagine you run a comparison site for hosting providers and your “best VPS for small business” page was showing up in AI Overviews around 3,800 times a month. You screenshot the chart, flip the toggle, and wait two weeks. When you come back, that line should have collapsed toward zero. If it has dropped by half, the toggle is working but not yet fully respected. If it has not moved at all, your property verification is probably wrong or the change did not save.
What it means in practice
If you run a content site that depends on informational search traffic, this is the first clean lever you have had. Until now, blocking AI use meant layering workarounds on top of an indexing system that was not designed to take the request, and the result was inconsistent. Now it is a single toggle, which makes it easy to test and easy to reverse.
If you are an SEO or agency, expect client questions about whether to opt out. My honest take is that most commercial sites should leave the toggle on. Being cited in an AI Overview still reads as a citation, and the click you do not get from the Overview box may show up later as a brand search or a direct visit. Sites that publish original reporting or strong opinions are an exception, since those tend to be the worst-cited and most-mangled inside AI answers. For everyone else, I would test before committing.
If you are a site owner who got burned by attribution issues with AI Mode earlier in the year, the toggle is your chance to do the experiment properly. Run your property with AI surfaces on for one cycle, then off for one cycle, and compare. That is more useful than arguing about it on a forum.
For developers and hosting operators like me, the practical concern is indexing load. Every new Search Console feature triggers a wave of URL inspection API calls from third-party tools, and a few of those tools are not exactly polite about it. Keep an eye on your crawl budget if you turn on heavy monitoring on a large property, especially right after a feature like this drops.
What to expect next
My expectation is that Google folds this report into the Search Console API surface within a few months, which would let third-party tools pull the same numbers you see in the UI. Right now the report is UI-first, which means anyone building dashboards has to scrape or wait, and Google knows that is not sustainable.
The opt-out itself is also likely to expand. The current toggle covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover, but Google’s documentation language is broad enough to leave room for new AI surfaces without another round of property-level configuration. That is a guess, not a promise, and I would not bet on it landing before the end of the year.
The third thing I expect publishers to push for is query-level data inside the AI tab. Right now you only get impressions and pages, and that is a real gap if you want to know which topics AI is pulling from you. Whether Google opens that up is a different question, because it would expose a lot about how AI Overviews are built, and I would be surprised if it happens quickly.
What to do this week
Log into Google Search Console, confirm you can see the new tab, and screenshot your baseline AI impressions for the last 28 days. That screenshot is your comparison point, and you will not regret having it. Then decide, on a per-property basis, whether to flip the opt-out toggle, and do it on one test property first rather than your whole portfolio. Watch the AI impressions line over the following two reporting cycles, and treat any drop as evidence rather than proof. If the tab is missing for you, do not assume it is broken. Wait a week, confirm your property verification type, and check again before you open a forum thread about it. The fastest thing you can do today is take the baseline screenshot, because that is the one step you cannot recover later.