The company says unsubscribing will not impact placement in regular searches. More than three years after it began rolling out AI Previews and a year after launching AI Mode, Google is offering webmasters the ability to exclude their domains from its AI-generated search results. In a blog post published early Wednesday morning, the company announced that it would begin testing a new toggle in its Search Console, designed to let website owners decide whether their web pages appear and help implement the company’s latest AI search features, including AI Previews and AI Mode. The company plans to first test this option with a small subset of domain owners in the UK before rolling it out globally.
“Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features,” Google said. “This control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these AI generative search features.” Along with this switch, the company said it is starting to roll out new insights in Search Console, designed to provide webmasters with metrics and more information about which of their pages appear in AI responses and in which countries. “We continue to work with website owners to understand what information will be most useful to inform their strategies, and we will introduce additional measures over time,” Google said.
Google said it was “actively listening to feedback from publishers and creators” and engaging with regulators, such as the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, when it came to providing website owners with “the right tools as user preferences evolve”. The announcement also comes just weeks after the company’s I/O 2026 developer keynote, during which it introduced a new dynamic search box that can grow larger to accommodate complex queries, as well as process videos, images, files, and even Chrome tabs as input. This announcement gave rise to numerous articles announcing the death of “Google search as you know it”.
While this sentiment was premature, there is growing resentment toward Google from the very publishers who provide the information that makes the company’s AI search features possible, and nowhere have those feelings been expressed more acutely than in a recent report. TBPN interview with Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast. The executive said he asked the company’s teams last year to “assume there’s no search” in order to increase page views and revenue. He then clarified that Condé Nast does not expect search traffic to reach literally zero, but he said he expects Google referrals to represent a single-digit percentage of total traffic in the future.
