Google's AI Overviews opt-out: should you flip it?

Google just built an off switch for AI Overviews. For two years the standard complaint from every business owner I talk to has been some version of "the AI answer is eating my clicks and I can't do anything about it." As of this month, you can. Google added a toggle inside Search Console that lets a site opt out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Discover, and here is the part that makes it real: Google confirmed it will not cost you a thing in regular search. In their own words, the control "won't be used as a ranking signal." You pull your content out of the AI features and your standard organic rankings stay exactly where they are.

This was reported by 9to5Google and Tech Times on June 2 and 3, and it traces back to a legally binding order from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, the British antitrust regulator, forcing Google to give publishers a genuine way out. So before anyone in Mount Pleasant rushes to find this switch, here is the first thing you need to know.

You probably can't flip it yet, and that's fine

The toggle is rolling out to a subset of website owners in the UK first. Google says it wants thorough testing before a global launch. Tech Times reports the opt-out signal starts being acted on June 17. So unless you happen to run a Charleston business through a UK Search Console account (you don't), this is not in your dashboard today. It's coming. When it lands, you'll see it in Search Console settings alongside a new report I'll get to in a minute.

One more boundary worth naming: the opt-out covers Google Search products only. The Gemini app is carved out. So even a site that opts all the way out can still show up inside a Gemini answer. The wall has a door in it.

My actual advice: most of you should leave it on

Here's where I'm going to disagree with the reflex. The instinct, the second a business owner hears "you can remove yourself from AI Overviews," is to do it. Don't. For a local service business, opting out is almost always the wrong move, and it helps to understand who this switch was actually built for.

The CMA order, and the publishers screaming for it, came from a specific corner of the web: news sites, recipe blogs, how-to publishers. People whose entire business model is you clicking through and seeing an ad on their page. When Google's AI summarizes a 1,800-word article into three sentences, that publisher loses the click and the ad revenue with it. For them the math is brutal and the opt-out is a lifeline.

You are not that. A roofer, a dentist, a James Island electrician does not make money from pageviews. You make money from a phone call and a booked job. When someone asks Google "who can fix a slate roof in downtown Charleston" and the AI answer names your company and pulls your reviews, that is not theft. That is the single highest-intent placement in local search, handed to you, with Google itself vouching for you. Opting out of that to protect a website click is trading a customer for a metric.

At this point a lot of owners are thinking: "But the AI answer means they never visit my site, so how is that a win?" Because the visit was never the goal. The call was. We covered this exact shift when Google put an AI chat box inside Maps with Ask Maps. Increasingly your Google Business Profile, not your homepage, is what the AI reads and recommends from. The job is to be the business the AI is confident enough to name, which is the whole point of getting your entity signals clean so AI search can cite you. You don't fix that by hiding.

The part of this update you actually want

Buried under the opt-out headline is the thing that genuinely matters for you. Alongside the toggle, Google shipped a new Generative AI performance report inside Search Console. For the first time, it shows your impressions in AI features and which of your pages are surfacing inside AI Overviews and AI Mode.

That has never been visible before. Until now, "are we even showing up in the AI answers" was a question I could only answer by manually typing queries into Google and Perplexity and reading what came back (which I still do, and you should too). Soon you'll have Google's own data on it.

Fair warning, and I want to be straight about this because it's a real limitation: the report does not include click data yet. Google has confirmed it's absent for now, with more metrics promised later. So you'll see impressions and surfacing pages, not clicks from AI features. That's still a leap. Impressions tell you which of your pages Google trusts enough to feed into an AI answer, and that's a map of where your authority actually lives.

What to do this week

You can't touch the toggle yet, so don't go hunting for it. Here is the real list.

First, when the Generative AI performance report shows up in your Search Console, open it before you touch anything else. Note which pages are appearing in AI answers. Those are your strongest pages. Build more like them.

Second, when the opt-out toggle does reach the US, leave it on (meaning, stay in the AI features) unless you have a specific, named reason not to. I have not yet found that reason for a service business in this market. If you think you have one, email me and let's pressure-test it together.

Third, keep doing the boring work that gets you named in the first place. A complete Google Business Profile with real service-area and hours attributes. Recent reviews you reply to. Service pages deep enough that the AI can pull a specific, correct sentence about how you handle a Folly Beach flat roof or a West Ashley sewer line. The off switch is a distraction. The on-ramp is your content and your profile, and that is where the work has always been.

This is the kind of thing we watch so our Charleston service-business clients don't have to, and it's why our Charleston SEO work has been pointed at AI visibility for months now, not bolted on after the fact. The businesses that win the next year of local search won't be the ones who opted out. They'll be the ones the AI couldn't stop recommending.