Google now gives every website owner an off switch for its AI features. Since the end of August there’s been a setting in Search Console that removes your site from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Then on 30 October Google announced it will also support a new, shared way of telling AI companies not to train their models on your content.
A few clients have asked me whether they should use these switches. For most small businesses my answer is no, or at least not the one that matters most. Here’s what each control does, what the early evidence says, and what I’d check on your own site this week.
What Google announced on 30 October
In a post on the Search Central blog, Google’s John Mueller said Google will support a shared “AI training preference” signal in robots.txt. That’s the small text file at the root of your site that tells search engines and other bots what they can and can’t do. The signal comes from AIPREF, a working group at the IETF (the body that agrees the technical standards the internet runs on).
The idea is simple enough. Instead of listing every AI company’s crawler one at a time, you add a single rule that says “please don’t use my content to train AI models”, and every company taking part respects it.
Some things are worth being clear about:
- It isn’t live yet. Google says it aims to support it “along with other AI providers in 2027”, and its crawler documentation says early 2027.
- The standard is still a draft. The current proposal, published the same day, is an individual Internet-Draft with no formal standing at the IETF yet. The details could change.
- It overlaps with an existing Google setting. If you use the new signal to opt out of training and don’t mention Google-Extended separately, Google says it will treat that as if you had blocked Google-Extended.
It’s interesting, but you don’t need to do anything about it today.
Google’s AI controls in plain English
These controls get mixed up a lot, so here they are side by side.
1. The Search generative AI control (in Search Console). You’ll find it under Settings, then Search generative AI. It decides whether your site’s links and content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Google Discover. According to Google’s help page, it was rolled out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026. Set it to Exclude and your content is hidden from those features, and you get no traffic or impressions from them. Google says the setting isn’t used as a ranking signal for the rest of Search.
2. Google-Extended (in robots.txt). This controls whether content Google crawls can be used to train future Gemini models and for “grounding” (feeding content from the Google Search index to Gemini when someone asks it a question). Google says it doesn’t affect your inclusion or ranking in Google Search. However, Google also says that sites which allow Google-Extended are eligible to appear in Gemini app answers and get clicks from them. So blocking it does cost you something.
3. The new shared training signal (from 2027). This is a single rule that says the same thing as Google-Extended to Google and other AI companies at once.
The important point is that none of the training controls take you out of AI Overviews, and the Search Console switch doesn’t stop training. They’re separate settings that do separate jobs.
OpenAI splits things the same way. According to OpenAI, its GPTBot crawler collects content for training, while OAI-SearchBot is the one that gets you shown in ChatGPT search. Block OAI-SearchBot and your site won’t appear in ChatGPT search answers. Block GPTBot and you’ve only opted out of training.
Should a small business opt out of AI Overviews?
In my view, almost certainly not.
More and more searches now begin with an AI answer, and the whole point of GEO (generative engine optimisation, meaning getting your business mentioned and cited by AI assistants) is to be one of the sources in it. Opting out doesn’t remove the AI Overview from the results page. It just means a competitor gets cited instead of you.
There’s also some early evidence. On 30 October, Search Engine Roundtable reported a test by SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard, who used the Search Console control to remove one site from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Its AI impressions dropped to zero straight away, which you’d expect. He estimated the click-through rate from those AI impressions at only about 0.9%. The surprising part was that the site’s ordinary organic clicks fell too. On the pages with the most AI visibility, average position dropped and then recovered once AI visibility was switched back on.
That’s one site and one test, and Shepard himself called it a small case study. Treat it as a hint rather than proof. Still, it points the same way as common sense: being visible in more places on the results page doesn’t seem to hurt, and disappearing from some of them may.
To be fair to the other side, a 0.9% click rate is low, and AI Overviews don’t send a flood of visitors. But they do put your name in front of people at the moment they’re researching, and being missing doesn’t win you those clicks back.
There are cases where opting out could make sense, such as a publisher whose business is selling the information itself. Even then I’d test it carefully before committing. For a builder, solicitor, dentist or online shop, I’d leave it switched on.
What about stopping AI training?
This is more a matter of principle than of marketing, and it’s your call. For most businesses I don’t see much to gain from it. Your service pages, prices and opening hours are exactly what you want people (and machines) to know about you.
If you do feel strongly, the sensible approach is to block the training crawlers (GPTBot and Google-Extended) and leave the search crawlers (Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot) alone. Keep in mind that blocking Google-Extended can keep you out of Gemini app answers. Once the shared signal is supported next year, it will be the tidier way to do this.
Google’s “official websites” test is another reason to stay in
On 15 October Google announced that it is testing a dedicated section at the top of AI responses for official sites, because sometimes there are only “one or two official places on the web” for a particular task. It is also adding more links inside AI answers and showing them higher up.
You are the official website for your own business, so you want to be the site Google picks for that section. Google hasn’t said how it chooses, so this next bit is my own educated guess: clear, consistent signals about who you are will help. That means matching business details everywhere, structured data (code that describes your business to search engines in a format they can read) and a site that is obviously the real one.
What to check on your WordPress site this week
- Search Console setting. Go to Settings, then Search generative AI, and make sure it’s set to Include (the default). If someone has set it to Exclude, find out whether that was deliberate. If you have more than one property for your site, check that none of them overrides the main setting.
- The Generative AI performance report. Google added it in June, and it shows how often your pages appear in AI features. It only reports impressions. Clicks from AI features are counted in the main Performance report.
- Your robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and look for Disallow lines under Googlebot or OAI-SearchBot. Also check for “User-agent: *” followed by “Disallow: /”, which is a classic leftover from a staging site that blocks everything. WordPress creates a virtual robots.txt unless a real file exists, and most SEO plugins let you edit it.
- Security plugin and firewall settings. Some offer a one-click “block AI bots” option. Check exactly which bots it blocks, so you don’t shut out the search crawlers along with the training ones.
- Your official signals. Use the same business name, address and phone number on your site and your Google Business Profile, add Organization or LocalBusiness schema, and have proper About and Contact pages.
- Leave the new training rule alone for now. It’s a draft, and Google won’t start reading it until 2027.
How I handle this for clients
These are exactly the kinds of settings that get changed by accident and then sit unnoticed for months. My Complete SEO & GEO Overhaul (£189, one-off) covers all of it: robots.txt, Search Console settings, firewall rules that might be blocking the wrong bots, schema, and content structured so AI assistants can cite it. It includes a free first month of my ongoing campaign, in which I keep an eye on your AI visibility and adjust things when Google moves the goalposts, which at the moment is most weeks. You can order online and I’ll get started.
Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert