There is no official off switch. As of August 2026, Google still does not let you disable AI Overviews across your whole account, and its own Search Help page says it in four words: features cannot be turned off.
That is not the whole story though. Several workarounds do still strip the AI box out of your results. This guide covers how to turn off AI Overview per search, per browser and per device, using only methods we tested by hand on 22 August 2026. Where something is fragile or broken, we say so.
Want the fastest fix? Click More > Web under the search bar. Want the permanent one? Make udm=14 your default search engine. Both are explained below.
The honest answer: Google has no global off switch
Google shipped AI Overviews in May 2024 and has never given users a toggle. The official Google Search Help article on AI Overviews states that the features cannot be turned off, then offers exactly one alternative: select the Web filter after you run a search. That is Google’s entire answer to the question.
Everything else you will read about how to turn off AI Overviews is a workaround. Some are excellent. Some break. None of them is a setting inside your Google account, because that setting does not exist.
The one real opt-out in 2026 is for publishers, not searchers
On 3 June 2026 Google announced Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, giving site owners impressions, pages, countries and devices data for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Alongside it, after the UK Competition and Markets Authority designated Google as having strategic market status in October 2025, Google began testing a Search Console toggle that lets a website keep its pages out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover. Google confirmed that using it is not a ranking signal for traditional Search. Testing started with a subset of UK sites.
That is the only sanctioned answer to how to turn off AI Overviews at the source, and it is aimed at publishers. Useful if you own a website. Useless if you just want cleaner search results. Keep the distinction in mind, because a lot of 2026 coverage blurs the two.
How to turn off AI Overview for one search
These are per-search fixes. No setup, nothing to install. Pick one and move on.
1. The Web filter
- Run your search on Google as normal.
- Under the search box, click More.
- Choose Web.
The page reloads with plain blue links: no AI Overview, no shopping carousel, no video block. Once you have used it, Web sticks around as a visible tab in the filter row for the rest of that session, so your next few searches are one click away. It does not persist across new tabs or new sessions, which is the whole reason people keep asking how to turn off AI Overview permanently.
2. Add udm=14 to the URL
The Web filter is just a URL parameter. Take any Google search URL and stick &udm=14 on the end:
google.com/search?q=your+query&udm=14
Identical result to clicking Web, and it works signed in or signed out, on desktop and mobile. It is the zero-setup version of how to turn off AI Overview on a machine that is not yours. If you would rather not type it, udm14.com is a free single-page search box maintained by the newsletter Tedium that fires your query straight into the Web filter. It was live and working when we checked on 22 August 2026.
3. Add tbs=1 to the URL
This one is barely covered anywhere and it is the best-kept trick in this whole guide. Append &tbs=1 to a Google search URL and the AI Overview disappears, but unlike udm=14 you keep the full standard results page: featured snippet, People Also Ask, images, the lot.
We tested it on 22 August 2026 against two queries that reliably trigger an AI Overview. Both lost the AI box and kept everything else. It surfaced on r/google in May 2026 and it is undocumented, so treat it as a trick Google could quietly kill. But right now it is the closest thing to a clean subtraction of the AI box alone, and the best answer we found to how to turn off AI Overview without losing the rest of the page.
Search operators: what actually happens when you add -ai
The most upvoted Reddit advice for getting rid of AI Overviews is to add -ai to the end of your query. It does remove the AI Overview. It can also destroy your results.
Here is what we got on 22 August 2026:
| Query | AI Overview shown? | Results returned |
|---|---|---|
| how long to boil an egg | Yes | Full results |
| how long to boil an egg -ai | No | Zero. “did not match any documents” |
| how long to boil an egg -noai | No | Full results, featured snippet intact |
| best running shoes for flat feet -ai | No | Thin. Most relevant pages excluded |
| best running shoes for flat feet -noai | No | Full results, Reddit and PAA intact |
The mechanism is simple. A negative operator suppresses the AI Overview, but it also excludes every page containing that term. Excluding “ai” in 2026 excludes an enormous slice of the web, and on shorter queries it can leave Google with nothing to show. So if you like operators, use -noai, not -ai. It suppresses the AI box the same way and only filters out the handful of pages that literally contain the string “noai”, which in practice means a few robots meta tag tutorials.
Still, this is a per-query habit, not a real answer to how to turn off AI Overview. Anyone selling the minus trick as a permanent way to disable AI Overview has not tested it on a short query.
The swear word trick
You may have seen the advice that adding profanity to a query suppresses the AI Overview. It does, because Google withholds AI Overviews on queries it classes as explicit. It also mangles your results and is unusable at work. File under “true but pointless”.
How to turn off AI Overview permanently in your browser
This is the setup most people mean when they ask how to turn off AI Overview for good. You change your default search engine once so that every search you type in the address bar carries udm=14. Then AI Overviews simply never load.
Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers
- Open chrome://settings/searchEngines (or edge://settings/searchEngines).
- Next to Site search, click Add.
- Name: Google (Web). Shortcut: web.
- URL: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14
- Click Add, then open the three-dot menu next to your new entry and choose Make default.
Use the plain https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 form if the braces version misbehaves. Everything else about Google keeps working, including image search and the tab row, and you can jump back to the AI version any time by clicking All.
Firefox
Firefox 140 added native custom search engines, so the old about:config fiddling is finally unnecessary.
- Menu > Settings > Search.
- Scroll to Additional search engines and click Add search engine.
- Name it, then paste https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
- Set it as your Default Search Engine at the top of the same page.
Brave is a special case. If you use Brave Search rather than Google, you can switch off Answer with AI in Brave’s own search settings, which is a genuine one-click toggle of the kind Google refuses to build.
Safari
Safari is where how to turn off AI Overviews gets genuinely annoying. Apple gives you a fixed list of search engines and no custom URL field, on macOS or iOS. Your options, in order of how much friction they cause:
- Install a Safari content blocker or redirect extension that appends udm=14 to google.com searches.
- Bookmark udm14.com and use that as your search page.
- Switch your default to DuckDuckGo, which has no AI Overview equivalent forced on you.
There is no native Safari setting. If a guide tells you there is, it is guessing.
Extensions and uBlock Origin filters
If you would rather hide the box than change how you search, this is a perfectly good answer to how to turn off AI Overviews on the results page you already know.
Browser extensions
The most established option is Bye Bye, Google AI, which has more than 100,000 users, a 4.3 rating and was last updated on 5 June 2026. It hides AI Overviews by default and gives you optional switches for the discussion block, shopping block, People Also Ask, videos and sponsored results. Google UDM 14 and Hide Google AI Overviews do narrower versions of the same job.
Be honest with yourself about the trade-off. These extensions work by hiding page elements with CSS. When Google renames a class, they break until the developer ships a fix. That is not a hypothetical, it happens several times a year.
uBlock Origin filters
Same technique, no third-party extension needed if you already run uBlock Origin. Go to the uBlock dashboard, open My filters, paste the rules, and click Apply changes:
- google.com##.hdzaWe
- google.com##.M8OgIe
We inspected a live Google results page on 22 August 2026 and both of those class names were still wrapping the AI Overview block. That will not be true forever. If your filter stops working, right-click the AI Overview, choose Inspect, walk up the DOM until you find the container that holds the whole block, and swap in its class. uBlock Origin Lite users need the Personalized Filters tab instead of My filters.
One caveat worth knowing: hiding is not blocking. The AI Overview is still generated and still downloaded, you just do not see it. The udm=14 approach actually stops it from being produced, which is why pages load noticeably faster.
Android and iPhone: how to turn off AI Overview on mobile
Mobile is where most guides go quiet, because Chrome’s custom search engine screen is desktop-only. Here is what genuinely works on a phone.
Two constraints shape everything below. Chrome for mobile has no custom search URL field, and the Google app cannot be modified at all.
Android
Chrome for Android does not let you type in a custom search URL. Its settings only let you pick from search engines you have recently visited. That limitation is also the workaround:
- Visit udm14.com or tenbluelinks.org in Chrome and run a search or two. Both publish an OpenSearch description, so Chrome registers them.
- Go to Settings > Search engine.
- Pick the newly listed entry from the recently visited section.
The cleaner Android answer is Firefox. It supports custom search engines properly and, uniquely among mainstream mobile browsers, it supports uBlock Origin. So you can run the udm=14 default and the cosmetic filters together.
iPhone and iPad
On iOS you cannot add a custom search engine in Safari or in Chrome. Realistic options:
- Use the More > Web filter manually. On mobile the filter row scrolls sideways, so swipe left along the tabs to find it.
- Save udm14.com to your home screen and use it as your search box.
- Install a Safari extension that rewrites google.com search URLs to include udm=14.
- Switch to DuckDuckGo or Firefox for iOS.
Also worth knowing: the Google app on Android and iOS ignores all of this. AI Overviews are baked in there, and no amount of URL surgery reaches it. If you care, stop using the app and search in a browser.
Turning off AI in Gmail and Google Workspace
Gmail’s AI features are a completely separate system from Search, with completely separate controls. The good news: unlike Search, these are real toggles that really do turn things off.
- Open Gmail on desktop, click the gear icon, then See all settings.
- On the General tab, scroll to Smart features and untick Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet.
- Still on General, find Google Workspace smart features and click Manage Workspace smart feature settings.
- Switch off Smart features in Google Workspace and Smart features in other Google products, then Save.
These are off by default for users in the EU, the UK, Switzerland and Japan, which is why plenty of people never see AI summaries in Gmail at all.
Two things to expect. First, turning smart features off also removes non-AI conveniences that were bundled in years ago, including Smart Compose, Smart Reply and package tracking. Second, on Workspace accounts your administrator can lock these settings, in which case the checkboxes are greyed out and you need to ask IT.
People searching for how to turn off AI Overview in Gmail are usually hitting Gemini summary cards at the top of a thread, not anything to do with Search. Those cards are governed by the smart features settings above. It is the one place in Google’s product line where the question has a clean, official answer.
Methods that do not work
A lot of advice published between 2024 and 2026 is now wrong. These are the ones we checked and could not reproduce.
| Method | Status, August 2026 |
|---|---|
| Search Labs toggle for “AI Overviews and more” | Gone for most accounts. It existed during the SGE experiment and for some Labs users afterwards, but it is not a reliable route now. |
| A setting in your Google Account | Does not exist and never has. |
| Turning off Search personalisation or Web & App Activity | No effect on AI Overviews. |
| Adding -ai to your query | Removes the AI box, but returned zero results on our short test query. |
| Signing out of Google | No effect. We saw AI Overviews on signed-out searches throughout testing. |
| Setting your region to the EU | Reduces some Google AI features, but AI Overviews rolled out across the EU during 2025. |
There is also a widely shared Google Help forum answer suggesting you turn off Workspace smart features to hide AI Overviews in Search. That controls Gemini inside Workspace apps. It does not remove the AI Overview from google.com.
If you take one thing from this section: any guide promising a single permanent setting is describing something that does not exist. The realistic ceiling for how to turn off AI Overview is a default search engine change plus a filter list.
For marketers: if users can switch it off, what happens to your traffic?
Now the part that matters if you run a website rather than just use Google.
Start with the size of the problem. Pew Research Center analysed the browsing data of 900 US adults in March 2025 and found that users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, versus 15% where it did not. Roughly half the clicks. Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself on just 1% of visits.
So the AI Overview roughly halves your click-through rate when it appears. That is the baseline everyone is optimising against.
The opt-out crowd is smaller than the panic suggests
Every guide like this one gets read by people annoyed enough to change a setting. The people who go looking for how to turn off AI Overview are a self-selecting group: developers, researchers, journalists, power users. The Chrome extension with the largest install base has around 100,000 users. Google Search handles billions of queries a day. The udm=14 crowd is a rounding error in your analytics.
The practical implication is uncomfortable but clear. You cannot wait this out, and you cannot count on users opting out on your behalf. Assume the AI Overview is the first thing most of your audience sees.
What to do instead
- Find out where you already appear. Run your money keywords through the AI Overview checker to see which queries trigger an overview and who gets cited in it.
- Optimise to be the citation, not the tenth blue link. That is the whole discipline of generative engine optimization: structured answers, clear entity coverage, extractable claims near the top of the page.
- Track the other engines too. Google is not the only surface summarising you. Our guide to checking whether ChatGPT cites your site covers the same job for OpenAI, and the AI visibility checker covers several assistants at once.
- Audit before you rewrite. A GEO audit will tell you whether the problem is content structure, crawlability or simply not being a cited source anywhere yet.
And if you are weighing up that Search Console opt-out toggle: opting out removes you from AI Overviews and AI Mode entirely. Your competitors stay in. Google says it will not hurt your normal rankings, but you are trading away every impression and every citation you were getting from AI surfaces. For most sites that is the wrong trade.
Frequently asked questions
Can you turn off AI Overview on Google permanently?
Not through any Google setting. The honest answer to how to turn off AI Overview permanently is to change your browser default search engine to a URL containing udm=14, which loads the Web filter for every search you run. That sticks until you change it back, and it works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Brave on desktop.
How do I turn off AI Overview without installing anything?
Click More under the search bar and choose Web, or add &udm=14 to the end of your Google search URL. Both do the same thing and need no extension. The Web tab then stays visible in your filter row for the rest of that browsing session.
Does adding -ai to a search still work in 2026?
It suppresses the AI Overview but it can wreck your results. When we tested the query “how long to boil an egg -ai” on 22 August 2026, Google returned zero results, because the operator excludes every page containing “ai”. Use -noai instead: it kills the AI box and leaves your results intact.
Is there an official Google setting to disable AI Overview?
No. Google’s own Search Help page for AI Overviews states that the features cannot be turned off and points users to the Web filter as the only alternative. Any guide describing a toggle inside your Google Account is out of date or wrong.
How do I remove AI Overview from Google on my phone?
On Android, install Firefox and set a custom search engine using the udm=14 URL, or visit udm14.com in Chrome so it registers as a selectable search engine. On iPhone you cannot add custom engines, so use the More > Web filter manually or save udm14.com to your home screen. There is no version of how to turn off AI Overview that works inside the Google app itself.
What is udm=14 and why does it remove AI Overviews?
udm=14 is the URL parameter behind Google’s Web filter, which returns text links only. Because AI Overviews are not part of the Web vertical, they never render. It is not a hack Google is hiding, it is the same filter exposed in the More menu, which is why it is the most durable answer to how to turn off AI Overview.
Can I turn AI Overview back on after using the Web filter?
Yes, instantly. Click the All tab on the results page and the standard page returns with the AI Overview. If you set udm=14 as your default search engine, removing that entry or switching your default back to Google restores everything.
Why did my AI Overview blocker suddenly stop working?
Google renames the CSS classes around the AI Overview block regularly, and every extension and uBlock filter targets those class names. When they change, your filter matches nothing. Update the extension, or inspect the page and replace the class in your uBlock rule. As of 22 August 2026, google.com##.hdzaWe and google.com##.M8OgIe were both still valid.
How do I turn off AI in Gmail?
Open Gmail settings, go to the General tab, and untick “Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet”. Then open Manage Workspace smart feature settings and switch off both Workspace options. Be aware this also disables Smart Compose, Smart Reply and package tracking, which are bundled into the same control.
Does turning off AI Overview make Google faster?
Yes, noticeably. The udm=14 answer to how to turn off AI Overview stops the overview being generated at all, so the results page renders without waiting on a model. Extensions and uBlock filters only hide the box after it has loaded, so they save you the visual clutter but not the wait.
Can website owners stop their content appearing in AI Overviews?
Since June 2026, yes, via a Search Console toggle that Google began testing with a subset of UK publishers after the CMA’s strategic market status ruling. It removes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover without affecting normal Search rankings. Most sites should think hard before using it, since it forfeits all AI-surface impressions.
Is the &tbs=1 trick reliable?
It worked on every query we tried on 22 August 2026, and unlike udm=14 it keeps the full standard results page while dropping the AI Overview. But it is undocumented and was found by users rather than published by Google, so treat it as something that could vanish without warning.
