Google just gave website owners a way to pull their content out of its AI-generated answers, and if you run a local business, the smart move is probably to leave that switch alone.
What's New
The company is rolling out a new setting under Settings in Google Search Console that lets you exclude your site from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's AI features while staying fully visible in regular search results. That's new. Until now, the only tools available, noindex tags, robots.txt, and snippet directives, were all-or-nothing: use them to keep content out of AI answers and you'd also disappear from normal search. The UK's competition regulator pushed Google to build this separation, and the control started reaching accounts outside the UK in July. Importantly, it doesn't touch your rankings, your local pack placement, or your Google Business Profile. It only governs whether Google can pull from your pages when it writes an AI-generated answer.
The Catch
Even for businesses that already have the setting: nobody, including Google, can say yet whether flipping it off helps or hurts. Data released this week shows AI Overviews increasingly display Top Stories style carousels inside them, so opting out of AI features might also mean opting out of placements you never thought of as “AI” in the first place. And the new Search Console report meant to help you decide only shows impressions, not clicks or conversions, so there's no real way to weigh the tradeoff yet.
Why This Barely Matters for Most Local Businesses
Publishers debating this toggle are weighing whether AI answers are cannibalizing their content traffic. Local businesses aren't chasing content traffic, they're trying to get found and chosen at the exact moment someone nearby is searching for a plumber, a dentist, or a consultant. Removing yourself from AI-generated answers to protect a metric that doesn't drive your leads is a trade most local businesses shouldn't make.
If the new setting shows up in your Search Console account, leave it set to include your site unless you have a specific reason, like a content licensing concern, to hide from AI answers.
This toggle is separate from your Google Business Profile, Maps listing, and local pack rankings; it only controls whether AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover can reference your web pages.
The new “generative AI performance” report in Search Console only shows impressions right now, not clicks or conversions, so don't make decisions based on it yet.
Page-level control isn't coming until 2027, so today's setting is all-or-nothing across your entire site, one more reason to be cautious before switching it off.
Watch for more reporting tools from Google in the coming months; regulatory pressure is pushing toward better visibility data, which should eventually help local businesses see how often they're surfacing in AI answers.
The bigger story isn't the switch itself. It's that Google is now building the infrastructure to measure and separate “AI visibility” from regular search visibility. That infrastructure should eventually give local businesses real answers about how often they're showing up, or getting skipped, when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation nearby.
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