Search Console's generative AI control: what changes if you exclude your site

Google includes your site by default in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Discover. Search Console's generative AI control lets you step out, and since August 31, 2026 it is available on every property worldwide. Here is what changes and how to measure it.

What Search Console's generative AI control is

It is a per-property setting that decides whether your content can appear in Search's generative AI features. You manage it in Settings > Generative AI in Search and, according to the official documentation, it is meant to "manage your site's inclusion in the following generative AI features".

The three options (and which one is the default)

• Include: your content can be shown as links and can help ground AI responses, and the site can receive impressions and traffic. This is the default: nobody is opted out by default.
• Exclude: your links and content stop being visible, cannot be used to generate responses or previews, and you receive no impressions or traffic from them.
• Inherit from parent property: inherits the value from the parent property and can be overridden at any time.

One important caveat from the docs: "content from other sites will still be available in these features and may look similar to yours". Excluding yourself does not empty the AI answer; it only takes you out of it.

Which features it covers and what stays out

It covers three surfaces: AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover. Search Labs experiments stay out, along with engines outside Google (ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini), which follow their own rules: see the guide to GEO and citations in AI assistants.

According to the doc on AI features and your website, no additional technical requirements or special optimization are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

What changes if you exclude your site (and what stays exactly the same)

What stops happening

Links to your site stop appearing in those features, your content cannot ground responses, and no impressions or clicks are generated. But your content does not disappear from Google: it stays in classic Search, in the regular results and in snippets.

What stays the same

Your rankings do not change, your indexing does not change, and your Performance report data stays where it was. The doc is explicit: "the content on your site can still be used to improve Google Search overall".

The point most people get wrong: excluding yourself does not protect your spot, because content from other sites will remain available and may look similar to yours. Exclusion is not an anti-theft measure: it is a voluntary decision to opt out of appearing.

What this control does not do (three expensive mix-ups)

It is not a ranking signal

The docs are clear: the control "is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal that affects other parts of Search". Opting out does not improve or hurt your rankings, and opting in does not boost them either.

It is not noindex

The control leaves your site in Search as usual. To keep your content out of the results the tool is a different one, noindex, with its own timelines: see the guide to the noindex tag and the one about removing or deindexing content.

It is not Google-Extended or the AI crawler robots.txt

The documentation separates both cases: "this control does not affect AI training. To limit the training of the models that generate responses in generative AI features, use Google-Extended". That is the territory of robots.txt and AI crawlers, with the official definition in the guide to how Google crawls. For engines outside Google, the path is blocking by User-agent.

Where the generative AI control lives and how to change it

The path is Search Console > Settings > Generative AI in Search, where you pick Include, Exclude or Inherit. The setting is per property (domain, URL prefix or subdomain) and it can be changed at any time.

1. Open the right property: the setting applies where you put it, not where you think you put it.
2. Pick the value and save. If you are going to exclude, start with a bounded section.
3. Log an annotation with the date of the change.

Inheritance: subdomains and subfolders

By default a property inherits the control from its closest parent property that has stopped inheriting; if no parent has a manually set value, the result is Include. Excluding the domain property makes the inheriting properties follow; excluding only a prefix or a subfolder leaves the rest of the site included, which lets you exclude one specific section (for example, paywalled content). And if a child property has the control set manually, it stops inheriting later changes from the parent: that is the most common mistake.

How long the change takes and how to verify it properly

The documentation warns that your content "typically takes a few days to be excluded": one or two days is normal, though some content takes longer because of caching and propagation across Google's systems.

Verifying it has a catch, because there is no per-page indicator:

• URL Inspection does not show a "control status": this is a property-level change, not a page-level one.
• Search Console annotations are the tidy way to measure before and after; they do not appear in comparison mode or in 24-hour views.
• Compare 28 days before and after, the AI row against the regular Performance report: if classic impressions dropped too, the problem is something else (see how to diagnose a drop in Google traffic).

Exclude or not: how to decide without giving away visibility

When the default option is the right one

For most sites, Include is the answer. The docs point to an under-quoted fact: "when users click through to search result pages with AI Overviews, those clicks are of higher quality". Excluding yourself does not remove a bot: it removes potentially good visits.

Two cases where excluding makes sense

1. Paid or paywalled content: you stay in classic Search with the headline and first paragraph visible, but AI does not summarize the whole piece; it can be applied to one section by using inheritance.
2. Businesses whose product is the content itself (proprietary data, research, reports you sell): they prefer the visit over a cited answer.

Four reasons not to do it

• It does not improve rankings: it is not a ranking signal.
• It does not stop scraping by other engines: ChatGPT or Perplexity follow their own path.
• It does not stop someone else from taking your place in the AI answer.
• It is silent: it can stay on forever. If you turn it on, document why, on which property and with what review date.

How to measure the effect with the generative AI performance report

The generative AI performance report in the Search view shows AI Overview and AI Mode impressions with the dimensions Pages (final URL after redirects, assigned to the canonical), Countries, Dates (Pacific time) and Devices, plus the search type filter (textual or multimodal web). Discover has a separate report. The reports were announced on June 3, 2026 and rolled out to all websites on August 31, 2026, alongside the global rollout of the control.

The limits to keep in mind

• Impressions only: no clicks, CTR, average position or queries.
• Recent data is preliminary; the chart aggregates by property while the table aggregates by page, so the two may not match; a 1,000 row limit; no Search Labs experiments.
• Logging incidents: system annotations flag processing issues. That is the first thing to check when the AI report drops.
• Outside Google, AI answer traffic does not arrive reliably labeled. The report is the best source available, not a perfect one: it measures direction, not millimeters.

It can be exported and combined with the rest of your performance, for example in an SEO dashboard with Data Studio, and the search type reading crosses with multimodal search in Search Console.

Final checklist for getting this decision right

1. Check whether your problem is AI or overall traffic.
2. Look at 28 days of AI impressions by page before touching anything.
3. If you are going to exclude, start with a bounded section, not the whole domain.
4. Review inheritance before and after the change.
5. Log an annotation with the date.
6. Schedule a review 30 or 60 days out and decide with data, not with hunches.

For almost every website the right answer is to leave the control on Include and work on becoming the source that gets cited, as Google's own generative AI optimization guide recommends. Excluding yourself is a legitimate business decision, but it is a subtraction, not a trick.