Google's New AI Opt-Out Setting: What It Means for Your Studio

On August 31, 2026, Google finished rolling out a new setting to every Search Console property in the world: a single control that decides whether your site can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the AI-generated results now showing up in Discover. It lives under Settings → Search generative AI, and it has two states — include your site, or exclude it. Most sites default to included. A small, deliberate choice in that menu can undo it.

This isn't a hypothetical. If you have Search Console access to your own site — and most photographers who've done any SEO work do — that setting exists on your account right now, whether or not you've ever opened it.

What “exclude” actually does

Choosing to exclude your site removes it from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover's AI features entirely — not just from being cited in the text of an answer, but from being linked at all. If someone asks an AI assistant grounded in Google Search “who's a good newborn photographer in Nashville,” and your site is excluded, it cannot be one of the answers. Not partially, not with a lower chance — it's simply not eligible.

Two things worth being clear-eyed about before anyone touches this setting:

• It doesn't stop the AI answer from happening. Someone still asks the question, and the AI still gives a list of names. Excluding your site doesn't remove you from consideration and leave a gap — it just hands your spot to whichever competitor didn't opt out.
• It doesn't touch your regular Google rankings. Google has said explicitly that this control isn't a ranking signal for ordinary search results. So this isn't a broader privacy dial that also happens to protect your visibility — it only costs you the AI side, with nothing gained on the search side in return.

Put together, there's no scenario where excluding your site is a defensive move for a local service business. It's a pure downside, which is exactly why it's worth understanding before an unrelated privacy sweep — a plugin, an agency, a “let's lock everything down” afternoon — flips it without anyone connecting the dots.

How this shows up in your AI Visibility scan

Studio Visibility's AI Visibility page already scores Google AI Overview alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, based on whether real questions about your specialty and city actually name you. If your site is excluded from Google's AI features, that one gauge reads zero — every time, for every prompt, with no way for you to move it by improving your site. The fix isn't a better page. It's the setting.

That's the specific failure mode worth watching for: everything else about your AI Readiness looks fine — your specialty is stated clearly, your reviews are solid, your pages answer what a client would actually ask — and Google AI Overview alone sits flat at zero while the other four engines show some movement. That pattern, more than a single low score, is the tell. We've added a note directly on the AI Visibility page pointing this out, because there's nothing in a scan itself that can distinguish “excluded from AI features” from “genuinely not being cited yet” — Google doesn't expose this setting through any API, for us or for anyone else. It's the one thing on that page you have to go check by hand.

How to check yours

1. Open Search Console for your site directly (search.google.com/search-console) — not through Studio Visibility, since this setting isn't something any third-party tool can read or change.
2. Go to Settings → Search generative AI.
3. Confirm your site is set to be included, not excluded.

If you've never connected Search Console to your site at all, this is a reasonable moment to do it — it's also what Studio Visibility uses to show your real search performance on the Specialty Analysis page, instead of the on-page-only estimate you get without it, so it's worth having connected either way.

The takeaway

This isn't a setting most photographers will ever need to change — the default is already the right answer for a local business trying to be found. The value here is just making sure nobody changes it for you without knowing what it does. Check it once, and unless something specific has you deliberately trying to keep your business out of AI search results, leave it alone. For the broader picture of what actually moves the needle once that's confirmed, see How Photographers Get Found on AI Search.