Google published detailed documentation on June 25 for its Search Console control that lets site owners include or exclude their content from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI inside Discover. The control itself is not new: it went live June 17 for a subset of UK site owners and has not yet reached a global audience. What Google added is a thorough help document that spells out exactly how the control works, what choosing exclusion forfeits, and how settings cascade across a property hierarchy.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz spotted the documentation and flagged it, noting that SEO consultant Glenn Gabe had drawn attention to the property inheritance mechanics on X. Gabe’s observation is the part that operators with complex site structures need to read first: child properties inherit the generative AI control from the nearest parent that has manually changed its setting. If no parent has done so, every sub-property defaults to the top-level domain’s setting. That means a single opt-out at the domain level propagates everywhere unless a child property overrides it.
The three settings Google documents are: include (the default for all properties, which allows grounding, links, impressions, and traffic from AI features), exclude (which removes the site from all of those surfaces), and inherit from parent (the default for any property that has a parent in Search Console).
The exclusion setting is where the real decision lives. Google is explicit that opting out strips the site of every form of visibility in the generative layer: no grounding, no links, no impressions, no traffic from AI Overviews, AI Mode, or AI-powered Discover results. Google also states that opting out is not treated as a ranking or inclusion factor in classic Search, so organic blue-link positions should be unaffected. Content drops out of AI features within one to two days, though caching can extend that window.
That framing presents publishers with an all-or-nothing tradeoff. Any site that currently receives meaningful referral traffic from AI Overviews citations gives that up entirely when it opts out. For publishers whose AI-feature traffic is small or unmeasured, that sacrifice may look acceptable. For publishers who have built audience pathways through AI Mode referrals, the math changes substantially, and the decision requires knowing what share of sessions currently originate from those surfaces before touching the toggle.
The geographic scope matters too. The control is live only for UK site owners at the time of Google’s documentation, meaning publishers in every other market cannot yet access it even if they want to. A UK-only rollout becoming a globally documented control is the clearest signal that broader availability is coming. Publishers outside the UK who want to plan their response have a window to audit their AI-feature traffic in Search Console’s AI Performance report before the setting reaches them.
Google’s documentation does not include any data on how many sites have used the control since June 17 or what aggregate traffic patterns look like for early adopters. The absence of that data means every site owner is making this call without a baseline from a peer group.
Publishers whose AI-feature impressions are growing should pull their Search Console AI Performance data now, segment by surface, and set a traffic threshold that would make exclusion economically irrational before the control reaches their market.
Reported by Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz), published June 25, 2026.
