Google’s opt-out from AI search results has left its UK test bed. The Search Console toggle, which lets a site withdraw from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s generative features while staying in ordinary search results, started showing up in accounts beyond the UK during July, weeks after Google began honouring the setting on 17 June. The move builds on the CMA order in June that forced the opt-out into being.

The rollout hands marketing teams a lever the industry has demanded since AI Overviews launched, with no way yet to price pulling it. Google’s accompanying generative AI performance report shows impressions only, with no clicks, no queries and no conversion data. Under the UK regulator’s timeline the click data is not due until December, and tracking data published in late July suggests the toggle may also control Top Stories placements that were never presented as AI features.

What does the Search Console AI opt-out cover?

Google announced the control on 3 June, the same day the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed its “publisher conduct requirement” obliging the company to give websites effective controls over how their search content is used in generative AI. The toggle sits under Settings in Search Console and covers three surfaces: AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover. Sites that opt out receive no traffic or impressions from those features but remain in standard search results, and Google says the setting is not used as a ranking signal anywhere else. Mrinalini Loew, Google’s general manager for the Search ecosystem, announced it alongside new performance insights and updated guidance for site owners, noting that AI Overviews now has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode has passed one billion, both by Google’s own count.

The setting took effect for an initial subset of UK properties, and during July it surfaced further afield: Jamie Indigo, director of technical SEO at Cox Automotive, flagged the control arriving on a US account. Changes take a few days to process, after which content should drop out of the covered features within a day or two.

The control is also narrower than a first reading suggests. It does not override choices in Merchant Center or Google Ads, so Shopping participation remains a separate decision. Nor does it touch model training, which runs through Google-Extended, the robots.txt token governing whether crawled content trains future Gemini models and grounds answers in Gemini Apps and on Vertex AI. Google’s crawler documentation states that Google-Extended has no effect on a site’s presence in Search. Blocking one does nothing to the other.

Could opting out also remove sites from Top Stories?

NewzDash, a firm that sells news-visibility tracking to publishers, reported on 28 July that Google has been rendering Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews rather than as a standalone module further down the page. Among the tracked news searches where Top Stories appeared at all, 15.5% in the US and 17.46% in the UK carried the carousel inside the AI Overview, and the embedded and standalone versions never appeared together in its results. The firm has not published sample sizes or collection dates alongside the figures, and Kyle Sutton, head of SEO and AI discovery at The Washington Post, has said only that the pattern matches what he sees anecdotally.

John Shehata, NewzDash’s founder and chief executive, reads the placement as covered by the new opt-out, since the carousel is a set of publisher links shown inside a feature the setting governs. He describes that as a high-confidence interpretation rather than a proven result, and says NewzDash plans to test it directly. Google has not said either way: its help page states that an excluded site’s links will not appear in the covered features, but is silent on traditional modules rendered inside them.

If Shehata’s reading holds, a news publisher opting out of AI summaries would also give up headline placements that predate them, and the hidden cost would fall hardest on the publishers most motivated to use the switch.

When will the data to judge the decision arrive?

The CMA’s conduct requirement obliges Google to provide clear and detailed metrics on user engagement with search content in generative AI features, and Search Engine Journal reports that click data and click-through rates are due under that timeline from December, with page-level controls required by March 2027. Until then the toggle is property-wide: one switch for an entire site, with no way to keep high-performing pages in while pulling sensitive ones out. Google must also report on its compliance every six months during the requirement’s first year. The reporting shift arrives alongside the AI visibility reports Google is building into Search Console.

The current reporting is the gap. The generative AI performance report, itself still rolling out to a subset of accounts, shows impressions by page, country, device and date, combines AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single figure, and carries no click or query data. Standard analytics cannot separate AI-feature referrals from ordinary organic visits either, so no clean baseline exists for the traffic an opt-out would forgo. Academic scepticism goes further: Oxford researcher Spencer Cohen and UCL competition-law researcher Todd Davies argued in the Journal of European Competition Law and Practice this spring that opt-out remedies “would be ineffective” at protecting publisher business models, a paper that discloses Davies worked at Google as a software engineer until 2022.

The practical position emerging across the SEO trade press is consistent: use the impressions data to establish a baseline now, leave the property-wide switch alone unless a brand-safety or legal position compels it, and revisit the question page by page once the finer controls land. For marketing teams accountable for organic pipeline, the calm move is measurement before action.

NewzDash says it will test whether opted-out publishers drop from Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews; Google’s first CMA-mandated click data is due in December, and the finer page-level controls in March 2027.