Google will let you opt out of AI Overviews. Should you?

There is a certain relief in the idea of an off switch. AI Overviews took the answer that used to live on your page, wrote it at the top of Google, and kept the click. So when word spread that Google might let you opt out, plenty of business owners felt the same thing: good, let me out. Take my site out of the machine and give me my search results back.

We understand the instinct. We think it is, for almost every small and medium business in Australia, a mistake. This piece explains what the opt-out actually is, why the answer for a Parramatta plumber is different from the answer for a national news publisher, and what to do instead of reaching for the switch.

What Google is actually offering

On 5 June 2026 it was reported that Google would give UK publishers a way to opt their websites out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, through a new control in Search Console (MediaPost). Read that sentence carefully, because the detail matters. It was reported. It was framed around UK publishers. And the mechanism sits inside Search Console rather than being an announcement of a global feature.

So the honest position for an Australian reader is this: do not assume you can do this today. It has not been confirmed as available to Australian businesses, and it was described as a control for publishers in another market. If you want to know whether an opt-out exists for you, the answer is not in a blog post, ours included. It is in your own Search Console. Check there before you act on anything you read about the UK.

This uncertainty is not a reason to stop reading. Whether or not the switch reaches you this quarter, the strategic question is the same, and it is worth settling before the button is in front of you and it feels urgent.

What opting out really does, and does not do

Here is the belief the opt-out quietly encourages: press this, and search goes back to how it was. Blue links. Clicks. The old deal. That belief is wrong, and it is the most expensive misunderstanding in this whole debate.

Opting out does not restore the old internet. The AI answer still appears for the person searching. Google still synthesises a response at the top of the page. Click-through rates on the links beneath it stay compressed. The only thing that changes is that you are no longer part of the answer. You have not removed the machine. You have removed yourself from the machine, and left it running, quoting everyone except you.

Think about what you actually forfeit. You lose the citation, which is the moment Google tells a ready-to-buy searcher that your business is a credible source. You lose the brand impression that rides along with being named. And you do not get the click back in exchange, because the searcher was never going to click through the old way anyway. Your competitors, meanwhile, stay in the answer, being read and remembered while you sit outside it feeling in control. That is the trade you are really making.

The one distinction that decides everything

There is a version of opting out that is entirely rational, and it is worth setting out fairly, because it is the reason this feature exists at all.

A publisher whose whole business model is ad impressions on its own pages lives or dies by the click. A large news site earns money when a human lands on its article and sees its advertising. If Google reads that article aloud in an AI Overview and the reader never arrives, the publisher has been robbed of the only thing it sells. For that business, being quoted without a click is not visibility, it is a loss. Google's dominance in this era is genuinely being tested by exactly this tension (CNBC). A news publisher opting out of AI Overviews can be a defensible, even correct, decision.

Now hold that up against a service business. A Parramatta plumber does not sell ad impressions. It sells booked jobs. Its goal is not traffic for its own sake, it is to be the name a homeowner trusts when a pipe bursts. When Google's AI answer says here are three well-regarded local plumbers and names you, that is not a stolen click. That is a recommendation delivered by the most trusted intermediary your customer has, at the exact moment they are deciding. Opting out of that is not protecting your business. It is asking to be left off the shortlist.

So the test is simple. Do you make money from impressions on your own pages, or from being chosen? If it is impressions, opting out may be sound. If it is being chosen, and for the overwhelming majority of Australian SMBs it is, staying in the answer is where the decision gets made.

Google is adding links back, which cuts against opting out

In May 2026 Google said it would put more links to websites back inside AI Overviews (Ars Technica). This sits inside the broader shift to AI-first search that Google set out at I/O 2026 (blog.google), and it points in a clear direction.

If the answer is going to carry more visible citations, then being one of the cited sources becomes more valuable, not less. Google is, in effect, building a shortlist into the top of every result and promising to show it more prominently. Opting out at the precise moment Google is handing more visibility to the sources it quotes is like taking your product off the shelf just as the shop announces a bigger, better-lit display for the brands it stocks. The counter-current here does not soften the case for staying in. It sharpens it.

What to do instead of opting out

If the switch is the wrong lever, what is the right one? The answer is to stop trying to escape the AI answer and start trying to win a place in it. That work has three parts, and it is the heart of what an AEO agency does.

• Make your content quotable. Answer the real question in the first two sentences, in plain language a model can lift cleanly, before any preamble. If your best answer is buried four paragraphs down, the machine will quote whoever put theirs first.
• Be the corroborated source. Answer engines prefer claims that more than one independent source supports. Consistent mentions, reviews and citations across the web do more for whether you are quoted than any single page on your own site.
• Measure citations, not just clicks. Prompt the major answer engines on a fixed set of questions and record whether you are named. Watch branded search and assisted conversions. Traffic can look flat while your visibility grows, so the measurement has to change too.

The same instinct applies beyond Google. If you want to be recommended inside ChatGPT as well, our guide on how to get cited by ChatGPT covers the tactics, and our walkthrough on how to rank in Google AI Overviews in Australia covers the on-page structure in more depth.

The honest cost of staying in

We are not going to sell you the comfortable version of this. Staying in the answer has a real price, and you should decide with your eyes open.

You may get fewer clicks per impression, and it may stay that way for good. People will read about your business, form an impression of it, and never touch your website in the process. If your reporting still treats a click as the only thing that counts, that will look like decline even as your brand is reaching more of the right people than ever. That is the genuine trade of the AI era, and no opt-out switch makes it disappear. Opting out just swaps fewer clicks for no visibility at all.

The businesses that win the next few years are the ones that accept the trade and adjust to it. They optimise to be the source. They measure being named. They treat a citation in front of a ready buyer as the asset it is. That is the work, and it is the opposite of reaching for the exit.