Since 1 August 2026, Google has been rolling out beyond the United Kingdom a new Search Console setting, Search generative AI control, which removes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features of Discover without taking it out of classic results (Search Engine Journal). This is a first: until now, no tool separated the two. For any SEO and GEO agency in Luxembourg, this switch raises a new question: the value of a citation in AI answers against a click that has become rare.
The facts
- The setting, tested in the United Kingdom since June 2026 under pressure from the British competition regulator (CMA, decision of 3 June), appeared on US accounts in July before a worldwide extension on 1 August (Search Engine Journal).
- It offers three options, Include, Exclude or Inherit from parent, without affecting classic rankings or model training, which depends on a separate control, Google-Extended (Google documentation).
- According to still partial data from the NewzDash tracker, around 15.5% of trending news queries in the United States show a Top Stories carousel embedded in an AI Overview (17.46% in the United Kingdom): the boundary between classic result and AI feature is blurring at Google itself.
Should you remove your site from Google's AI answers?
Two camps face each other. Stay included, say some: excluding your site does not remove the summary that captures attention before the click, it hands the citation to a competitor who stayed visible, argues ZeroClick Labs; a position shared by the head of Noble, whose company sells precisely AI visibility services. On the other side, publishers point out that they are included by default, without the data that would let them measure what these answers cost them; Digiday cites the loss of 800 million Google visits suffered by the US group People Inc. between early 2024 and early 2026, and predicts that few publishers will actually flip the switch.
The real obstacle is measurement. The Search Console's Generative AI features report, which tracks the AI overviews Google is also rolling out in France, shows impressions but neither clicks nor queries, and assigns position 1 to every link in the same AI block, whether featured or folded away in a menu, as consultant Dan Taylor has detailed. The British regulator itself considers this data insufficient: it requires Google to provide click data by December 2026, then page-by-page controls by March 2027. And this setting only concerns Google: it changes nothing about a site's presence in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot, nor about its organic rankings.
AIxH's view
For almost every company, no reliable data currently justifies switching to Exclude: as long as click data is missing, leaving AI answers is a gamble, and the calculation cannot be made. The right move in August 2026 comes down to two steps: check whether the Generative AI features report is available in your Search Console, and measure what Google already shows of your site in its answers. That is what we do in our audits, as an SEO agency in Luxembourg for the organic foundation and as a GEO agency in Luxembourg for visibility in AI answers. A first conversation is often enough to see clearly.