How can I control whether my content appears in Google AI Overviews?
If you publish the source page, Google documents crawl and preview controls for how its content can appear in Search, plus a France-specific participation control. Our September Index recorded 2/30 residential-property Overview targets with no Overview on 22 September 2026; a missing answer alone cannot prove that a publisher used a control.
What we measured
Reported. Google's site-owner guidance, read on 29 October 2026, identifies Googlebot as the Search crawling control. It lists nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex for limiting displayed information. These controls have different scopes; excluding a page from Search is not equivalent to limiting a particular passage's preview.
Google's 22 July France announcement separately reports a Search Console control available in France for participation in generative Search features. It says this is not a ranking signal outside those features. Reasoned. That country-specific statement should not be expanded into a worldwide account feature.
Measured. The Index method and records preserve two explicit no-Overview outcomes for residential property management on 22 September 2026. They are collection outcomes, not an experiment in publisher exclusions. No causal opt-out effect was measured.
What this means for you
For a passage-level decision, Google's guide names data-nosnippet; for preview length it names max-snippet. It also lists nosnippet and noindex, whose scopes differ from selecting one passage. Google's separate Google-Extended reference concerns training and grounding in some other systems, whereas the Search guide assigns Search crawling to Googlebot. Choosing between those named controls depends on which use of the page you intend to govern.
Read the received page. Google's troubleshooting instructions say to use URL Inspection to check the HTML Googlebot received and allow time for recrawling and processing. A directive visible only in your editor is not evidence that the crawler received it. Equally, an unchanged answer immediately after a source edit does not establish that a documented control has failed.
Also asked as
Taking control: Removing your content from AI Overviews [and switching them off]
Related
- Google’s publisher guidance
- The France-specific announcement
- The consumer-control question
- The September records
Next step
To inspect a separate public answer before considering a source correction, start with the Free 10-question check (one engine). No email is needed; runs are limited per network and per day, and by the site's daily allowance.
For one sourced factual error, Fix one answer, $490. Retain the answer and the document that supports the correction.
Every figure comes from the published method, v1.1.
Prepared by the Broadcastwell team.
Page owner: Rohan Iyer, AI Engineer. Corrections: hello@broadcastwell.com