Yes, the switch is real. Google added a setting in Search Console that pulls your site out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Google’s AI answers in Discover. For most plumbing, roofing, HVAC and electrical companies, the honest answer is to find it, look at it, and leave it alone.
What the setting actually is
In Search Console, under Settings, there is an entry called Search generative AI. Google’s help page for it is titled “Search generative AI control.” That page carries no update date.
It offers three choices, worded plainly. “Include my site’s links and content in Search generative AI features” is the default. “Exclude my site’s links and content from Search generative AI features” is the opt out. The third, “Inherit control from parent,” means the property is following a bigger property above it.
That third one matters if you own more than one property. The help page says a property “inherits its Search generative AI control from its closest parent that has changed its control to stop inheriting,” and if no parent has changed anything, it follows the top-level domain property. So a choice made on your main domain carries down to a subdomain under it until somebody sets the smaller one on purpose.
Google also says it is “rolling out this control to a subset of website owners, allowing for thorough testing before rolling it out further.” The announcement was narrower still. It said the rollout was beginning “to a subset of website owners in the UK, allowing for thorough testing before rolling them out to website owners globally.” If you go looking and the setting is not there, nothing is wrong with your site. You are just not in the group yet.
What flipping it off takes away
Google announced this on June 3, 2026, in a post on its own blog by Mrinalini Loew, General Manager, Google Search Ecosystem. Her sentence is short: “Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.”
The help page says the same thing from the machine’s side. Content crawled from your site “won’t be eligible to be used as an input to generate an AI response or preview in Search generative AI features.”
So it cuts both ways. Your links stop appearing in the AI answer, and your words stop being used to build that answer at all. For a trade that gets found on questions like why a water heater is leaking, that is a real place your name was showing up.
The change is not instant either. Google’s help page says content “will be excluded within 1-2 days after the control goes live, but some content may take longer to be excluded due to caching and propagation across Google systems.” That page says nothing about how long it takes to come back if you set it to Include again.
What it does not touch
Three things stay where they were.
- Normal search results. From the help page: “This control only affects whether your content can appear in certain Search generative AI features; this control isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search.”
- AI training. The same page sends you somewhere else for that, to a separate control called Google-Extended. Whether that one has any effect on AI Overviews is its own question with its own answer.
- Everything that is not Google. This switch lives inside Google Search Console and reaches Google’s own features. What ChatGPT reads on your site runs on entirely separate rules.
It is worth knowing what the default already gets you. Google’s separate guide, “AI features and your website,” last updated December 10, 2025, says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” The same page sets the bar for being shown as a supporting link: the page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Nobody has to buy their way in, and nobody has to opt in.
Who the switch was really built for
Loew’s post frames this as choice, not advice. Google is not telling anyone to use it.
The owners who tend to want that choice are the ones whose whole business is the words on the page. News sites, paid research, people who sell what they publish. For them, an answer that repeats their work without sending a reader is a straight loss.
A local trade site is close to the opposite. Your pages are not the product. They exist to get somebody to pick up a phone. Getting named in an answer next to your town is the reason those pages were written.
If your reason for opting out is really about who is allowed to use your words and your job photos, that is a legal question rather than a marketing one. This is not legal or tax advice, and the rules that apply to you depend on your own state. Ask an attorney licensed there before you touch the setting, especially if you license your content or your photos to anyone else.
What nobody can tell you about this yet
Google says the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal outside these features. That is Google describing Google. Nobody outside the company can audit it. Treat it as a stated policy, not as something that has been measured by an outsider.
There is also no published study on what opting out does to a local contractor’s phone. Anyone who quotes you a percentage on lost calls from this switch is guessing, and the control has only been live since June. What has been measured is the wider question of what AI answers do to clicks, and that one has numbers behind it.
One more thing worth saying out loud. Do not pay anybody to flip this. It is a free setting inside a free tool on a property you already own, and it is one click. If a marketing company offers to manage your AI opt out for a monthly fee, that fee buys a click you can do yourself in under a minute.
What to do this week
Five plain steps, in order.
- Log into Search Console and pick your property. If you have never verified one, do that first, since none of this shows up otherwise.
- Open Settings, then Search generative AI. Read which of the three options it says.
- Leave it on Include unless you can write down a reason not to, in a sentence, that survives being read back to you.
- Look for the generative AI performance report if your account has it. Google started rolling it out alongside the switch, and it counts how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. That report is a job of its own, and a number beats an opinion.
- Then go back to the actual work. Pages that answer the questions a customer types, on a site that loads.
If you want to see whether AI assistants name your business at all before you decide anything, a free scan asks them what a customer would ask and writes down who got named. And the ongoing side of this, the search checks, is all in the second half of that list. None of it starts with this switch.