AI is rapidly becoming an integral part of everyday life, with many of the services we interact with daily now utilizing machine learning technology in some way, shape, or form. Google began rolling out its AI overviews in mid-2024 and has continued to refine them ever since, although not everybody is happy with the quality of the information these summaries provide.
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Some have accused Google of promoting low-quality, unverified summaries, with AI overviews often drawing their information from inaccurate or outdated sources. Their prominent placement at the top of results pages makes this all the more problematic and has led many people to wonder if there's a way they can turn off Google AI overviews for good.
How to Turn Off Google AI Overviews
Users can temporarily disable Google AI overviews by adding -AI to the end of their search. Sadly, Google does not offer a way to permanently disable the feature, although you can get around this if you set up a custom search engine using Google's Web filter. It's worth noting that this will also do away with featured snippets and some of the other core features of Google Search, although for those who are desperate to disable AI overviews, this is the only permanent solution that doesn't involve using third-party browser extensions.
How to Use Google's Web Filter
- While in Chrome, navigate to chrome://settings/searchEngines/
- Scroll down to Site Search and click the Add button
- Fill in the Edit Search Engine box using the details in the table below, then press the Save button
- Click on the three dots to the right of Google Web and choose Make Default
|
Edit search engine |
|
|---|---|
|
Name |
Google Web |
|
Shortcut |
@web |
|
URL with %s in place of query |
{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14 |
Why Do Some People Want to Disable Google AI Overviews?
If you've found your way to this guide, you probably already have a pretty good idea why people might want to turn off AI overviews in their Google search results. For those who don't, though, it usually comes down to accuracy. As mentioned above, Google's AI overviews sometimes pull data from unreliable or outdated sources, which can result in wildly inaccurate summaries. Some, like the one shown above, are very obviously wrong. However, others can appear accurate at first glance, which has the potential to be problematic if users take the information at face value.
