Google’s Search AI controls and the Generative AI performance report have reached every website in the world. Google confirmed the milestone in an update footnote appended to its original announcement. The features launched in June, tested first with UK-based site owners, then widened through the summer. August 31 marks the finish line, not the starting point.
The footnote sits at the bottom of “New controls for website owners,” Google’s June 3 blog post credited to Mrinalini Loew, General Manager of Google Search Ecosystem. It now reads:
“As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these features to all websites worldwide.”
— update to Google’s “New controls for website owners” post
Two tools shipped under that post: the Generative AI performance report, and a new opt-out setting called Search AI controls. Both now sit inside every property in Search Console, not a subset.
What are Search AI controls?
Search AI controls are a property-level setting in Search Console with three options: Include, the default; Exclude; and Inherit from parent, which lets a child property follow its parent’s choice. Selecting Exclude keeps a site’s pages out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features inside Google Discover. It leaves standard Search ranking, Merchant Center, and Ads participation untouched.
The Cost and the Limit, in Google’s Own Words
Google states the cost of opting out plainly, alongside the limit on how far the setting reaches:
“Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.”
“This control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features.”
— Google, “New controls for website owners” (two separate statements from the post)
Read together, the two lines box the toggle in tightly. Exclude a site, and it disappears from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s AI features, with no traffic or impressions from any of them. Google’s help documentation on the control’s mechanics confirms the same boundary in more detail: Exclude doesn’t touch normal ranking or inclusion, doesn’t override Merchant Center or Ads participation, and doesn’t stop Google from using a page’s content to understand query language. Exclusion generally takes effect within days, most content within one or two, though caching can stretch that window. Google gives no fixed deadline.
The toggle also has nothing to do with AI training. That lever is Google-Extended, a separate robots.txt-level control. A site owner who wants out of model training should check robots.txt, not this setting.
The Report Behind the Decision
The instrument for making that call is the Generative AI performance report, an expandable tab inside Search Console’s Performance report. It shows impressions only, broken out by page, country, device, and time down to the hour. There’s no click data and no query data, a gap that hasn’t closed since the report reached more properties earlier in August. A site owner weighing Exclude has exactly one number to weigh it against.
That number also spent part of its rollout undercounting itself. Google’s data anomalies page still documents a logging error that hit the report from August 13 through August 17, a window now closed. The entry, verbatim: “A logging error caused a decrease in impressions on the Generative AI performance report in Search for data from August 13 – August 17, 2026.” Anyone reading that week’s numbers today should still treat them as suspect.
Google’s own figures on scale, from the same post: AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users. Both counts come from Google, not from an independent measurement. The report meant to inform the Exclude decision shows only a site’s own impressions, nothing about the audience those features serve.
Before flipping the switch, read the impression trend by page and by date, and flag any week that might carry the August undercount. Then weigh that single number against Google’s own terms: Exclude removes gen-AI traffic entirely, with no promised gain to classic rankings in exchange. That’s the whole trade, stated in Google’s words, not ours.
