If you’ve ever wondered whether your website’s content is being used to build Google’s AI Overviews, or wanted a way to stop it, Google has now given UK site owners both an answer and a choice.
On 3 June 2026, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) imposed a new conduct requirement on Google search in the UK, following its decision to designate Google with “strategic market status” under the UK’s digital markets competition regime. The requirement gives UK website owners, described by the CMA as publishers, a genuine way to stop their content being used to power AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI-powered Discover results, and requires Google to properly attribute content with clear links when it is used.
Google responded the same day by introducing a new opt-out toggle in Search Console. Sites that switch it on will stop appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI in Discover, but will continue to appear completely normally in regular Google Search and the Discover feed. Google has confirmed that using this setting will not affect regular search rankings.
Alongside the opt-out, Google has added a new report showing impressions for pages that do appear in AI-generated answers, broken down by page, country and date. Both features started rolling out to a subset of UK website owners first, before a global rollout, which means some b:web clients may already have access.
Up to now, AI Overviews and AI Mode have been something of a black box. Your website’s content might be shaping the answer Google gives someone before they ever click through, but there was no way to see it happening, and no way to stop it if you didn’t want it to.
For most small businesses, appearing in an AI Overview is more likely to be helpful than harmful, since AI Overviews and AI Mode together reach billions of searches a month and can be a route to visibility even without a click. But being able to see how often your pages actually appear in AI answers gives you real information to work with rather than guesswork. And for any business with a specific reason to want its content kept out of Google’s AI features, for example concerns about advice or pricing being summarised out of context, there’s now a genuine way to do that.
Check your Search Console account to see whether the new AI reporting and opt-out controls have reached your profile yet. If they have, the new impressions data is worth a look simply to understand how visible your business is inside AI answers, even if you have no reason to opt out.
This is a genuinely new, practical lever for the AEO and GEO side of SEO we’ve talked about before, being seen and cited correctly by AI tools, not just ranking well in traditional search. If you’d like help understanding what your AI visibility looks like, or deciding whether opting out makes sense for your business, get in touch with the b:web team in Plymouth and we can talk it through.
