What the control covers
The setting is called "Search generative AI" and it lives in Search Console's settings. It governs links and grounding in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features inside Discover. Google is explicit about the boundaries: it does not affect ordinary Search rankings, Merchant Center, or Google Ads participation, and it is not the AI training control, which is a separate mechanism entirely.
Turning it on is not instant. Google says changes take a few days to process, after which content drops out of those surfaces within one to two days, and caching can stretch that further. The control appeared on some US accounts in July 2026 and is still rolling out to a subset of site owners rather than everyone.
It exists because a regulator required it. The UK Competition and Markets Authority imposed a conduct requirement on Google in June 2026, and the rest of that timeline is worth tracking on its own terms: click data and click-through rates for AI surfaces are due by December 2026, and page-level controls by March 2027. Today the switch is all-or-nothing at the property level.
Should a store touch it?
The people arguing hardest about this are publishers, and their arithmetic is not a retailer's. A news site watching AI Overviews summarise its article and keep the click has a grievance about substitution. A store whose products get cited in an AI answer is being recommended to a buyer, which is the opposite problem.
The Top Stories overlap sharpens it further. NewzDash tracking puts Top Stories carousels inside AI Overviews on 15.5% of US trending-news queries and 17.46% of UK ones, so opting out of the generative surface can remove a site from the news carousel that renders within it. That is a publisher cost, and it is the clearest illustration of how entangled these placements have become.
What nobody has is the number that would decide it. Google publishes no click or conversion data for AI Overviews, which means any merchant weighing the switch is estimating the loss with nothing underneath the estimate. The CMA has given Google a December 2026 deadline for exactly that data.
What to do about it
Check whether the control is in your property yet
Open Search Console settings and look for a "Search generative AI" entry. Rollout is partial, so its absence means nothing is wrong. If it is there, note that it applies at the property level rather than per page, so a single toggle covers the whole site until page-level controls arrive in 2027.
Measure your AI presence before you consider changing anything
Run the queries you sell against and record whether an AI Overview appears and whether you or a competitor is cited in it. A store that is being cited is getting the recommendation; a store that is invisible has a different problem, and neither one is solved by the opt-out. Without that baseline the switch is a decision made on nothing.