By now you’re probably familiar with Google Search’s AI-organized snippets, which now appear at the top of Google Search results after you ask a question.
Initially, the only way the AI Overview appeared was if you signed up for Search Labs, which lets you participate in Google’s latest AI experiments. Now, the AI-created summary is released to everyone in the United States.
Check: Google’s artificial intelligence overview: What it is and why it goes wrong
If you haven’t seen the AI overview in Google yet, it’s only a matter of time.
While you might appreciate Google doing more of the heavy lifting when you do research, you might not want an AI-generated snippet to be the first thing you see when you search on Google. Google’s Gemini generative artificial intelligence model powers these summaries, but Gemini — like artificial intelligence today — isn’t always accurate.
AI Overviews has suggested eating pizza with glue. and drinking urine to pass kidney stones quickly.
So is there a way to turn off the AI overview? The answer is more complicated than you think. For more information, see what else Google talked about at Google I/O, including what to expect from the upcoming Android 15.
What is Google Search AI Overview?
AI overviews are AI-generated answers to questions you ask in Google Search. Google said that starting on May 14, AI overview results will begin to appear at the top of Google searches whenever Google’s search systems determine that these types of AI-generated responses provide useful information quickly.
For example, if you type “what was the shortest war in history” into a Google search, you might see information about the 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War, thanks to AI Overviews. Below the AI-generated summary, you’ll see links to all the resources used, which you can click to view the websites from which the information was drawn.
This is an artificial intelligence overview of “What was the shortest war in history?” The answers come from four sources, including Wikipedia.
If you scroll down, you’ll probably see the featured snippets you’re used to seeing on Google Search, along with those “People Also Ask” sections, Quora and Reddit “Q&A” boxes, related videos, and website links.
Who has access to the AI Overview?
Google began testing the AI Overview in 2023 with a small group of people who signed up for its Search Lab, where it experiments with possible search features. Here’s the latest Google input/output At the conference, Google announced that it will launch AI Overviews to hundreds of millions of users in the United States, and will soon be launched in more countries. Google expects to provide an AI overview to more than 1 billion people by the end of this year.
An overview of AI for everyone presented at Google I/O 2024.
Is there a way to turn off Google Search AI Overview?
Now, the important question: Is there any way you can turn off the AI overview in search results?
Unfortunately, you can’t go into Google or Chrome settings and disable this feature.
For those of us at CNET who have tried it, the Artificial Intelligence Overview has been closed in the Hunt Lab, and if anything, all we can do is enhance the Artificial Intelligence Overview to cover when we open it in the Lab More search topics.
Google stated on the lab page, “ [the AI Overviews and more experiments] off does not disable AI overview in searches outside the lab.
If you enable the AI overview experiment setting, you can ask more complex questions in Google Search and get a more comprehensive overview of AI. You can ask a question like “Create a 5-day meal plan that includes blueberries” and you’ll receive an AI-generated response at the top of a Google search. Great for people who like blueberries, but terrible for people who don’t like artificial intelligence.
You can’t deactivate AI overview, but you can make it extensive.
Earlier this year, there seemed to be a way to turn off the AI overview in search results, but now it’s fixed in the results. So, are there any other ways to get away from the AI overview?
You can’t turn off the AI overview, but you can do the following…
Google may not have given us an obvious way to turn off AI overview in Google Search, but there are some workarounds.
The first solution, whether you’re on a mobile device or a computer, is Use the “Web” tab that appears at the top of Google search results. If you don’t see it – it should appear along with the All, News and Images tabs – scroll left or right until you see it. You’ll still initially see any AI snippets at the top, but this allows you to quickly go to more traditional searches that only include links. If you’re using a computer, there’s a way to make the Web tab the default option when searching on Google online.
read more: Google Search without Ads or AI: How to Get Only Links in Results
The second solution is Use a web browser other than Chrome. We don’t receive an AI overview for queries in Safari and Firefox as we do in Chrome. Unfortunately, this only works on your computer, not on mobile devices.
The third workaround also only works on your computer, which is use this Hide Google AI Overviews extension for Chrome. If you’re a Chrome user who doesn’t want to use any other browser, but also doesn’t want to use AI snippets, this extension will remove all AI-generated snippets from your Google search results.
For more information, here are all 13 Google AI tools, including an interesting Gmail AI tool.
Editor’s note: CNET used an artificial intelligence engine to help create dozens of stories and tagged them accordingly. The annotation you are reading accompanies an article that deals with the topic of artificial intelligence in substance, but is written entirely by our expert editors and writers. For more information, please see our artificial intelligence policy.
