The Search generative AI control is a site-level setting in Google Search Console, introduced in mid-2026, that lets a site owner opt out of Google's generative AI Search surfaces — AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's AI features — without affecting how the site appears in regular Google Search. Google has stated the control is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal elsewhere in Search, so an opted-out site keeps its normal ranking, indexing, and featured snippets.
Its significance is the decoupling. Before it existed, Google's guidance was that the only way to keep a page out of AI Overviews was the nosnippet directive — which also stripped featured snippets and preview text, penalising the page in classic Search. The new control separates "stay out of the AI answer" from "keep my normal Search visibility," making the opt-out a real, reversible choice rather than a costly one.
It is narrow by design. It is a display-and-grounding setting inside Google Search — not a crawl rule (robots.txt), not a training control (Google-Extended), and not effective outside Google. It does nothing about how ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude retrieve and cite pages. Reported effective from 17 June 2026 and rolled out first to a subset of UK site owners before widening, its availability was still uneven as of August 2026, so treat any specific status as dated. For most visibility-seeking brands the standing advice is to leave the control on and work on being cited well, not to opt out of a growing answer surface.