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We rely on Google every day to give us information. But what happens when our source of knowledge becomes messy and unreliable? AI Overviews utilize Google's Gemini AI to provide an answer to your query right on the search page; no need to click.
Still in its infancy, this feature occasionally surfaces incorrect information, so some web surfers look to disable it entirely. There are a few ways to make an AI Overview go away, but no method is as simple as tricking Google itself into getting rid of it. Google uses search modifiers, called operators, which can help narrow down search results. Here are a few examples:
- Use quotations (" ") to search for the exact phrase
- Add site: to search a single website
- Search for a certain type of file with filetype:
- Exclude terms with a minus (-) symbol
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Looking at that last modifier, it was posited online that adding -AI at the end of your search query prevents Google from serving up an AI response. I tested this idea, and it works, but there's a twist.
(Credit: PCMag / Google)As you can see in the image above, asking who owns Facebook will generate an AI-generated summary. And if you add the term -AI at the end of the query, an overview is not generated. It's a very simple solution to the AI Overview problem that can be quickly repeated on subsequent queries without needing multiple steps.
(Credit: PCMag / Google)However, it's worth noting that this doesn't work because of the -AI modifier. On subsequent tests, I found that putting pretty much anything in there (Ex: -i, -pcmag, -farm) also did the same thing. Also, several other operators will disable the AI Overview from displaying.
So, no, Google didn't add a secret AI kill switch to its search engine. Instead, it's likely that AI Overviews are only available under certain conditions, and by using a search modifier, you circumvent those parameters. Still, it's an easy way to game the system until we get an easier way to disable these overlays (or we move to an alternative search engine).