If you’ve logged into Google Search Console this month and noticed a new toggle under Settings, you’re not imagining it. Google has confirmed the global rollout of its Generative AI opt-out control is now complete on every website it indexes, UK included. The feature exists because the Competition and Markets Authority ordered it. Back in June, the CMA used its new Strategic Market Status powers over Google to force exactly this: a way for site owners to keep their content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI-generated Discover summaries, without dropping out of normal search results.

For UK SME owners, this lands at an odd moment. AI-powered search has gone from a novelty to the default: roughly one in three Google searches in the UK now triggers an AI Overview, and around half of UK adults have used AI search in some form this year. So the arrival of an opt-out isn’t just a technical footnote, it’s a real decision every business with a website now has to make, whether they realise it or not.

What the toggle actually does

The setting lives in Search Console under a property’s settings menu, and it’s off by default. Switch it on and Google stops using your pages to generate AI Overviews, AI Mode answers and AI-written Discover summaries. Your normal blue-link search rankings are untouched, and so is your ordinary Discover feed placement. You can also opt out separately from having your content used to train Google’s AI models, which is a distinct setting worth checking if that concerns you.

Crucially, this is a blunt instrument. It’s all-or-nothing per property. You can’t say “quote my pricing page but not my blog,” at least not yet.

Should you actually switch it on?

For most SMEs, no, and here’s why. AI Overviews increasingly answer questions without a single click to any website, which has genuinely hurt organic traffic for some publishers. But for a local plumber, a bookkeeping practice or a software consultancy, appearing inside an AI-generated answer to “who does X near me” or “how do I fix Y” is often free visibility that wouldn’t have existed at all if the user hadn’t searched. If under 5% of UK SMEs have optimised for AI search at all, per recent industry research, the bigger risk right now isn’t being quoted by AI, it’s being invisible to it.

The businesses who should seriously consider opting out are the ones whose entire commercial value is the content itself: subscription publishers, paid research, or sites where a summarised answer directly substitutes for the paid product.

What to do this week

Two practical steps. First, go into Search Console and check the new Generative AI performance report, it now sits alongside your normal Search performance data and shows how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews specifically. Most owners have never seen this data before because it didn’t exist until this year. Second, resist the urge to flip the opt-out toggle reflexively out of general AI wariness. Make the call based on what that new report actually shows for your site over a few weeks, not on principle.

If you’re not confident reading Search Console data or structuring content so AI systems can actually cite you accurately, this is exactly the kind of small, contained job worth handing to a specialist rather than guessing, whether that’s a technical SEO consultant or a team like BuildApps that already works with UK SMEs on AI visibility.

The takeaway: the opt-out exists now because regulators forced Google’s hand, not because Google wants you to use it widely. Check your new Generative AI report before you touch the toggle, most SMEs will get more from being visible in AI answers than from hiding.