Google has introduced a mechanism allowing website owners to exclude their content from its artificial intelligence-powered search results, the company confirmed.
The move gives publishers direct control over whether their material appears inside AI Overviews — Google’s feature that generates synthesized answers at the top of search results pages — for the First Time.
How It Works
Webmasters can add a specific HTML tag, `googleon: all`, or its counterpart `googleoff: all`, to their pages to signal Google’s crawlers to include or exclude content from AI-generated summaries.
The tag operates independently from existing robots.txt directives, which control standard web indexing, meaning publishers must take separate action to manage AI exposure.
The Opt-Out Question
Still, the decision to opt out carries significant trade-offs.
AI Overviews now appear in a substantial share of Google searches. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that Google processes more than 8.5 billion searches per day, and the company has been steadily expanding AI Overview coverage across queries.
Opting out means a site’s content Will Not contribute to — or appear cited within — those AI-generated answer blocks.
For publishers, that cuts both ways. AI Overviews can surface a site’s content to users who might not click through to the original page, offering visibility without traffic. By contrast, appearing as a cited source inside an AI Overview can occasionally drive direct visits.
That said, many publishers have argued AI summaries cannibalize traffic by giving users answers without compelling them to visit the underlying site — a concern that has fueled broader tension between the news industry and Google.
Broader Publisher Tensions
Several major news organizations and content publishers have already taken legal or contractual steps to limit how AI systems use their work.
The New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023. Separately, some publishers have signed licensing deals with AI companies, choosing negotiated compensation over unilateral restriction.
Google’s opt-out tag offers a third path: a technical, unilateral choice that requires no legal filing and no negotiation.
Even so, it places the burden squarely on individual publishers to act, rather than requiring Google to seek affirmative consent before using content in AI outputs.
The Indexing Dilemma
Opting out of AI Search entirely while remaining indexed for standard search results is now technically possible under Google’s updated controls.
In practice, however, many smaller publishers lack the technical staff to implement and monitor such tags across large content libraries.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has documented growing concern among digital news outlets about AI-driven traffic erosion, with referral patterns from search engines shifting markedly since Google began rolling out AI features in 2023.
Google launched AI Overviews to all U.S. users in May 2024, later expanding the feature to more than 100 countries.
