Should You Let Google Use Your Website in AI Search?

Google has just given website owners a choice they did not previously have.

As of 31 August 2026, you can keep your website in normal Google Search while excluding its links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover.

For most commercial websites, we would leave AI Search access enabled for now.

Turning it off stops Google from using your website to ground answers in those AI Search experiences. It also guarantees that your website cannot receive links, impressions or traffic from them. Your competitors can remain visible.

The more useful question is not whether you like Google using your content. It is whether the value of being discovered through AI Search is greater than the value of withholding that content.

That answer can be very different for a service business, an ecommerce store, a news publisher and a company selling proprietary research.

Google has changed the bargain between websites and Search

Traditional search had a relatively understandable exchange. Google crawled your website, organised information about it and sent people through to pages that appeared relevant to their search.

Generative AI changes that relationship because Google can use information from multiple websites to construct an answer before the person visits any of them.

The wider internet is changing in the same direction.

Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report found that automated traffic accounted for more than 53 per cent of web traffic in 2025, compared with 47 per cent from humans. That figure includes many types of automation, so it would be inaccurate to say that AI bots alone now outnumber humans online.

AI driven activity is, however, growing quickly. HUMAN Security reported that monthly AI driven traffic grew 187 per cent during 2025, while traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers increased 7,851 per cent compared with the previous year.

Websites are increasingly being accessed, interpreted and acted on by machines as well as people.

Google’s new control matters because website owners can now make a more deliberate decision about whether participation in AI Search is worth the exchange.

What Google’s new AI Search control actually does

The Search generative AI control now appears in Google Search Console for website properties.

Google gives website owners three practical options:

• Include the site’s links and content in generative AI Search features.
• Exclude the site’s links and content from generative AI Search features.
• Inherit the setting from a parent Search Console property.

Inclusion is the default.

If your website stays included, Google says its content can appear as links and can be used to help ground responses in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Your website remains eligible for impressions and traffic from those experiences.

If you exclude it, Google says your links and content will no longer appear in those features and crawled content from your site will not be eligible as input for generating those responses.

Importantly, Google says this choice does not affect your ranking or inclusion elsewhere in ordinary Google Search.

Google also notes that excluding your content does not prevent similar information from other websites appearing instead.

So opting out does not remove your subject matter from AI Search. It removes you as an eligible source for those experiences.

AI Search and AI model training are separate decisions

This is one of the most important distinctions to understand.

There are really three separate questions.

Google explicitly says its new Search generative AI control does not control AI training.

Google Extended is the separate mechanism publishers can use to manage specified uses of crawled website content for future Gemini model training and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. Google also says using Google Extended does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

That means a business concerned about model training should not automatically assume that excluding itself from AI Search solves that problem.

What do you gain by staying in Google AI Search?

The most obvious benefit is continued eligibility for discovery.

Google says AI Overviews now have more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode has passed one billion monthly users. Those are Google’s own figures, but they demonstrate the scale at which the company is pushing generative Search experiences.

If your website exists to attract people who do not already know your organisation, disappearing voluntarily from a growing discovery surface deserves a strong reason.

This is particularly relevant for businesses where useful content supports a larger commercial objective.

A consultant might publish an article to demonstrate expertise and create an eventual enquiry. A tourism operator might publish destination information that leads towards a booking. A retailer might publish buying advice that introduces its products. An education provider might answer questions that eventually lead to course consideration.

The article itself does not necessarily need to generate revenue. Its job may be to help the right person discover the organisation.

For those businesses, allowing Google to surface the content in AI Search can still have strategic value even when every impression does not produce a visit.

Visibility is not the same as traffic

This is where the decision becomes harder.

Google has also launched a dedicated Generative AI performance report in Search Console. Website owners can now see impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, identify which pages appear most often and break the data down by country, device and date.

That is useful because previously much of this visibility was difficult to separate from ordinary Search performance.

But the dedicated report currently focuses on impressions. It does not give website owners the same dedicated view of AI specific clicks, click through rate, leads or conversions.

That creates a significant measurement gap.

A page receiving 100,000 AI Search impressions is not automatically more valuable than one receiving 5,000. You still need to understand whether that visibility contributes to visits, brand discovery, enquiries, sales or some other meaningful business outcome.

The uncomfortable part: AI answers can reduce clicks

The strongest argument for opting out is not hypothetical.

Generative Search can answer enough of a question that the person no longer needs to visit the websites used to construct the response.

Pew Research Center analysed 68,879 Google searches associated with 900 adults in the United States during March 2025.

When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8 per cent of visits. When no AI summary appeared, they clicked a result in 15 per cent of visits.

Clicks on links contained directly within AI summaries were rarer, occurring in just 1 per cent of visits where an AI summary appeared.

Ahrefs found a similar direction in a different dataset. Its February 2026 analysis compared 300,000 keywords and reported that the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 58 per cent lower average click through rate for the top ranking page in its December 2025 data.

Those figures should not be treated as universal traffic loss forecasts.

The Pew research involved a specific group of American users during one month in 2025. The Ahrefs research is observational and shows correlation rather than proving that AI Overviews caused every difference it measured. Search behaviour also varies enormously by query, industry, brand, device and intent.

Google presents a different side of the story. It says its AI Search features encourage people to search more frequently and argues that the visits sent from AI experiences can be higher quality.

Both things can potentially be true.

AI Search can increase the total number and complexity of searches while reducing the proportion of individual searches that result in a website visit.

That changes what search visibility means.

Who should probably stay included?

For most commercial websites, we think staying included is currently the more sensible starting position.

That includes many service businesses, agencies, consultants, ecommerce companies, tourism operators, education providers, business to business organisations and brands using content to create demand.

The common factor is simple: the information exists primarily to help create a larger commercial opportunity.

Consider a business publishing an article explaining how to choose between two approaches.

If someone discovers that business through an AI response, recognises the brand and later considers it when purchasing, the content may still be doing its job even if the original interaction did not produce an immediate click.

Opting out removes that possibility from the Google AI experiences covered by the control.

It also does nothing to prevent competitors, publishers, forums or other websites discussing the same topic from appearing instead.

If discovery is the objective, giving away the discovery channel before understanding its value is difficult to justify.

When opting out deserves serious consideration

The calculation changes when the content itself is the product.

A newspaper earns value from readership. A subscription publisher may depend on people entering its own environment. A research company may sell access to information that took considerable resources to produce. A specialist database may contain information whose value can be substantially consumed without visiting the original website.

For these organisations, an AI system answering the user’s question without sending the user onwards can have a more direct economic consequence.

The principle is useful beyond publishing:

The greater the standalone commercial value of the information, the stronger the argument for controlling how another platform can reproduce its usefulness without a visit.

This tension is one reason the new Google control exists.

In June 2026, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority imposed requirements designed to give publishers greater control over how their content is used in Google’s generative Search features, along with clearer information about attribution and engagement.

Those requirements are specific to the United Kingdom and should not be interpreted as Australian regulation. Google has since made the resulting Search Console controls available worldwide.

You may not need one rule for your entire website

One of the most useful parts of Google’s implementation is that the decision does not necessarily need to be completely site wide.

Search Console properties can inherit the setting from a parent property, but owners can also configure supported child properties separately.

For example, an organisation might want its service pages, product information and general educational articles available to AI Search while taking a different position on a section containing proprietary research.

That creates a better question than simply asking whether Google AI should be on or off:

Which parts of our website benefit from wider distribution, and which contain value we should protect more carefully?

This approach requires the relevant website sections to be configured appropriately as Search Console properties, so it should be treated as a deliberate technical and content architecture decision rather than an arbitrary toggle.

Five questions to ask before you opt out

1. What is the content supposed to achieve?

Start with the commercial purpose.

If the content exists to help potential customers discover your organisation, restricting distribution may work against the reason you published it.

If people paying for or directly consuming the information is the business model, the calculation is different.

2. How unique is the information?

If your article explains information available on hundreds of other websites, excluding it is unlikely to prevent Google from answering the question.

Google explicitly says other websites with similar information can still appear after your site is excluded.

Proprietary data, exclusive research and distinctive intellectual property deserve more careful consideration.

3. Is Google already using your pages in AI Search?

Do not make the decision without looking at the new Generative AI performance report first.

Identify which pages receive impressions, which sections of the website dominate visibility, which countries those impressions come from and whether the pattern is growing.

You now have more evidence available than you did before the worldwide rollout of these reporting tools.

4. What would you actually lose?

If your website already receives meaningful visibility from AI Search, opting out has an observable opportunity cost.

If the site receives almost no impressions, the immediate cost may be smaller, although that can change as Google’s products and user behaviour evolve.

Measure what exists rather than making the decision entirely from principle or fear.

5. Are you trying to control Search or model training?

Make sure you are using the right control for the concern.

If the issue is whether your website appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode, the Search generative AI control is relevant.

If the concern is specified uses of crawled content for Gemini model training and grounding, investigate Google Extended.

If the goal is to disappear from Google Search altogether, that is a different technical decision again.

What we would do today

For most commercial websites, we would remain included in Google AI Search for now.

We would then use Search Console to understand which pages are appearing, how AI visibility changes over time and whether those pages support meaningful business objectives.

We would be more cautious where the content has substantial standalone commercial value, particularly paid publishing, proprietary research, databases, licensed material or information that can be largely consumed without visiting the original source.

In those cases, we would assess the relevant website section independently rather than assuming every page needs the same policy.

Most importantly, we would not opt out simply because AI Overviews can reduce clicks. We also would not stay included simply because AI visibility sounds valuable.

This is a distribution decision.

The internet is becoming increasingly machine mediated. Search engines, crawlers and AI agents are consuming more of the web alongside human visitors, and businesses will need to think more deliberately about which machines they want to serve, what those machines can access and what they receive in return.

Google has finally given website owners more control over one part of that relationship.

The next step is deciding how that control supports the actual role of your website.

If you are trying to understand how AI Search, website architecture, content and measurement should fit into your wider digital strategy, Made By Beings can help you work through the decision.