The CMA won an AI Overviews off switch. If you are not a publisher, leave it alone.

On 3 June 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority announced what it called a world first: Google must let publishers opt out of having their content power AI features in search, including AI Overviews. The switch is now appearing in UK Search Console accounts, including yours. For most businesses reading this, flipping it would be a straightforward mistake.

What actually happened

The CMA designated Google with strategic market status in general search services, the first designation of its kind under the UK digital markets competition regime. Google carries the large majority of UK search, which is what put it there.

The announcement on 3 June 2026 set out several requirements. The headline one: publishers must be able to opt out of their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews. Google has nine months to implement all the changes, though the CMA says it expects important parts to arrive well before that, and Google must file compliance reports every six months for the first year.

Two other pieces matter and got less coverage. Google must attribute publisher content properly, using clear links, in AI-generated results. And after consultation, Google must also let publishers opt out of their content being used for the fine-tuning of AI models, which is separate again from the search opt-out.

Who this was won for

Read the CMA's language and the intended beneficiary is obvious: publishers. Specifically news publishers, whose complaint is coherent and serious. They invest in journalism, Google summarises that journalism at the top of the results page, and the reader gets the answer without ever arriving at the site that paid for it. For a business whose entire model is selling attention on its own pages, being summarised is a direct transfer of value.

That is a real grievance and the remedy is a reasonable answer to it.

It is not your grievance. If you run a dental practice, an accountancy firm, a plumbing business or a clinic, your website does not sell advertising against page views. It exists to be found by somebody who needs what you do, and then to convince them. Being summarised in an AI Overview, with a clear link, is not a theft of your business model. It is a shop window you did not have to pay for.

The three switches everybody is confusing

This is where the genuine damage will happen, because at least three different controls are being discussed as though they were one thing, and they do completely different jobs.

The generative AI control in Search Console. This is the new one. It lives in Settings, under Search generative AI, and it decides whether your site is eligible to appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover. Set it to exclude and you stop appearing in those surfaces, which also means you stop receiving traffic and impressions from them.

Google-Extended in robots.txt. This is a training control. It governs whether your content can be used to train Google's models. It is widely and wrongly described as a way to stay out of AI Overviews, and it does not do that at all. AI Overviews are built on ordinary Googlebot crawling and indexing, so a page blocked to Google-Extended remains fully eligible to appear in one. If you blocked Google-Extended believing it kept you out of AI Overviews, it never did.

Blocking Googlebot. This removes you from Google Search. All of it. Nobody should reach for this and it is only worth naming because it is the thing people imagine the other two are doing.

There are also page-level snippet controls, nosnippet and data-nosnippet, which are a fourth thing again and govern what text can be shown from a page. Four controls, four jobs, and almost every article written about this treats them as interchangeable.

Should you use the new one?

Almost certainly not, and here is the test.

Does your business make money from people arriving on your pages and seeing advertising or paywalled content? If yes, you have a genuine decision to make, and the arithmetic is about whether summary traffic is worth less to you than the summarisation costs. Publishers, comparison sites and ad-funded content businesses are in this group.

Or does your business make money from somebody finding you, trusting you and getting in touch? Then opting out removes you from a surface where people are actively asking questions you can answer, and you get nothing back for it. You are not protecting revenue, you are declining distribution.

The second group is nearly everybody. A person asking an assistant which dental practice near them does implants is the highest-intent visitor you will ever have. Being absent from that answer is not a principled stand, it is an empty diary.

There is also a practical point about reversibility. Opting out is not a one-way door, but re-entry is not instant either, and you would be running the experiment on your own visibility with no control group. That is an expensive way to find out.

What the attribution requirement actually buys you

The quieter half of the CMA remedy is the one that helps a small business most.

Google must now attribute publisher content properly, with clear links, in AI-generated results. That is the difference between being invisibly absorbed and being visibly cited. For a business trying to be found, a clear link inside a summary is not a consolation prize. It is the thing you wanted.

So the remedy has two halves, and the half that suits most UK businesses is not the switch. It is the requirement that when you are used, you are named.

What to do instead

Leave the control on include. That is the default, and for the second group above it is correct.

Make yourself easier to summarise accurately. Publish the things people actually ask about in plain language: what you do, what it costs, where you work, what your hours are. An assistant summarising a page that states its prices produces a better answer about you than one inferring from marketing copy. That is the whole argument behind being visible to AI assistants, and it has not changed.

Check the assistants can reach you at all. The most common cause of being absent is not a policy choice, it is a firewall or a CDN rule quietly turning crawlers away while robots.txt says they are welcome. Our free AI crawler checker reads what your site actually says to them.

And if you do nothing else, stop blocking Google-Extended under the impression it keeps you out of AI Overviews. It does not, it never did, and the only thing it has been doing is opting you out of a training corpus while leaving the surface you were worried about entirely unaffected.

The timeline, honestly

Google has until roughly March 2027 to implement everything, with compliance reports every six months in the first year, and the CMA expects parts to land sooner. The control has been appearing in UK Search Console properties first and spreading outward.

So this will keep moving. What will not change is the underlying question, and it is not a technical one: does your business get paid for attention on your own pages, or for being found by somebody who needs you? Answer that and the switch answers itself.

If you want somebody to look at what your site is actually telling search engines and assistants before you touch anything, that conversation is free, and we will tell you if the answer is to do nothing.