How to Turn Off AI on Google: Remove AI Overviews and AI Mode

Last updated: October 31, 2026

Key Takeaways

• Google's own help documentation says AI Overviews are a core Search feature that cannot be turned off. There is no switch in your Google account, Search settings, or the Google app.
• Five workarounds still remove them: the Web filter, a custom search engine using udm=14, the -ai search operator, a browser extension, or a no-AI search engine. The udm=14 method is the one that makes it permanent.
• Google is not removing AI Overviews. As of its October 28, 2026 earnings call, the company is expanding ads inside AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and more countries.

If you search Google for almost anything, an AI-written summary now sits above the links. It is often fine, sometimes wrong, and always in the way when you wanted the websites themselves. People search for ways to turn it off more than 20,000 times a month in the US alone, and the answer from Google has not changed since 2024: you can't.

That is true for the official settings. It is not true in practice. This guide walks through every method that still works as of the end of October 2026, which ones have stopped working, how to handle the newer AI Mode tab and the AI Mode button in Chrome, and what Google has said about the feature this month. Each method is short enough to set up in a few minutes.

Can you turn off AI on Google?

Not through any setting Google provides. Google's AI Overviews FAQ states that AI Overviews are a feature of Search, like knowledge panels, and cannot be turned off. The same FAQ points people to the Web filter instead. Turning off the "AI Overviews and more" experiment in Search Labs only removes the experimental extras, not the summaries in normal results.

What you can do is change how you reach Google, so the AI Overview never loads. Every method below works that way. None of them require a Google account, and all of them can be undone.

How do you remove AI Overviews from Google Search?

The fastest permanent fix is a custom search engine that adds udm=14 to every search. The fastest one-time fix is the Web filter. Here are all five methods in order of how much effort they take.

Use the Web filter (any device, one search at a time)

Google added a "Web" results view in 2024. It returns text links only, with no AI Overview, no AI Mode, no video carousels and no "People also ask" boxes.

1. Search Google as you normally would.
2. Under the search box, look at the row of filters: All, AI Mode, Images, Videos, News, and so on.
3. Click or tap Web. If it is not visible, tap More first.

The drawback is that it resets every time. You have to pick Web again for each new search. If that bothers you, use the next method, which does it automatically.

Set a custom search engine with udm=14 (permanent, desktop browsers)

udm=14 is the URL parameter behind the Web filter. When you make it part of your browser's default search engine, every search typed into the address bar opens the Web view directly and the AI Overview never appears.

Chrome and Edge

1. Open Settings, then Search engine, then Manage search engines and site search. In Chrome you can paste chrome://settings/searchEngines into the address bar to go straight there.
2. Next to Site search, click Add.
3. Name: Google Web. Shortcut: @web (or anything you like).
4. URL: {google:baseURL}search?udm=14&q=%s
5. Click Add, then open the three-dot menu next to your new entry and choose Make default.

Firefox

1. Open Settings, then Search.
2. Scroll to Search Shortcuts and click Add.
3. Name: Google Web. URL: https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s
4. Save it, then choose it as your Default Search Engine at the top of the same page.

Safari on Mac

Safari does not allow custom search engines. Your options are the Web filter, the extension method below, or the site tenbluelinks.org, which offers a Safari extension and setup steps for other browsers that build the udm=14 search for you.

One limit applies to all browsers: this only affects searches typed into the address bar. If you go to google.com and type into the search box on the page, you get the normal results with the AI Overview. Make the address bar your habit and the problem goes away.

Add -ai to your search (any device, no setup)

Typing -ai at the end of a search tells Google to exclude the term "ai," and as a side effect it drops the AI Overview. Example: best cable modem for gigabit -ai.

Two cautions. Google has never documented this behavior, so it can stop working at any time. And because it is a real exclusion, any page that mentions "AI" in its text is removed from your results, which matters if the topic you are researching involves AI.

Install a browser extension (Chrome, Edge, Firefox)

The best-known option is Bye Bye, Google AI, a free extension built by Avram Piltch, the editor-in-chief of Tom's Hardware. It hides AI Overviews and also lets you turn off other result clutter such as video blocks, "People also ask," text ads and the Discussions box, each with its own checkbox. It is available in the Chrome Web Store (which also covers Edge and other Chromium browsers) and on Mozilla's add-ons site for Firefox.

1. Open your browser's extension store and search for Bye Bye Google AI.
2. Click Add and accept the permission prompt. The extension only needs to read and change Google search pages.
3. Click the extension icon on any Google results page to pick which elements to hide.

Extensions work on the google.com search box as well as the address bar, which the udm=14 method does not. The trade-off is that you are trusting a third party with read access to your search pages. Check the developer name and the install count before you add any extension that promises to block AI.

Switch to a search engine without AI (optional)

If you would rather not fight Google's defaults at all, two privacy-focused alternatives give you a no-AI results page by design:

• DuckDuckGo No AI at noai.duckduckgo.com, a version of DuckDuckGo with AI answers, AI feature prompts and most AI-generated images removed. You can use it without changing your default search engine.
• Startpage, which returns Google's web results through a privacy proxy, without Google's AI layer and without your search history attached to your account.

How do you turn off AI Mode on Google?

AI Mode is the chat-style tab next to "All" in Google results, and it has no off switch either. The practical answer is that AI Mode only runs when you open it. The udm=14 method above lands you on the Web view, which does not show the AI Mode tab, so you will not see it or trigger it by accident.

Chrome is a separate problem, because Google added an AI Mode button to Chrome's address bar and new tab page during 2026. To remove it:

1. Right-click the address bar and uncheck Always show AI Mode shortcuts. This removes the suggestion chips.
2. If the button itself remains, type chrome://flags into the address bar, search for AI Mode, set AI Mode omnibox entrypoint to Disabled, and click Relaunch.
3. In the same flags list, you can also set Search with AI Mode to Disabled to remove the right-click menu option.

Chrome flags are experimental switches, and Google can remove or rename them in any update. If a button comes back after an update, repeat the steps.

How do you turn off Google AI on your phone?

Phones have the fewest options, because mobile Safari and the Google app do not let you add a custom search engine.

• iPhone (Safari): Use the Web filter after each search, or add -ai to your query. If you want a permanent fix, install Firefox for iOS, which allows custom search engines, and add the udm=14 URL there.
• Android (Chrome): Chrome for Android picks up the custom search engine you created on desktop if you are signed in and syncing. Otherwise, use the Web filter or the -ai operator.
• Google app and Android search bar: No control is available. The Web filter is the only option inside the app.
• Samsung and Pixel phones: The home screen search widget opens the Google app, so the same limits apply. Switching the widget to a browser search gives you the custom engine instead.

What does not work anymore

Method	Status	Why
Search Labs "AI Overviews and more" toggle	Does not remove them	Only opts you out of experimental features; the standard AI Overview stays in results
Google Account privacy settings	No option exists	AI Overviews are not tied to an account setting
Signing out of Google	No effect	AI Overviews appear for signed-out searches too
Changing your region or language	Mostly no effect	AI Overviews now run in more than 200 countries and dozens of languages
Using "Google Classic" sites and bookmarklets from 2024	Unreliable	Most were built on parameters Google has since changed; udm=14 is the one that has held up

Is Google removing AI Overviews?

No. Every public signal from Google in October 2026 points to expansion, not retreat. The clearest statements came from Alphabet's third-quarter earnings call on October 28, 2026:

• Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, said Google is scaling ads inside AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users, more queries and, for the first time, international markets, and is testing multi-turn ads in AI Mode in the US. He said the lower monetization of AI Mode queries weighed on Search ad growth, which slowed to 12% year over year from 17% in the prior quarter.
• CEO Sundar Pichai said Search query growth was the highest it has been in five years and attributed it to AI features. He described AI Mode queries as three times longer than traditional searches on average.
• Google's stated priority is building the Search experience first and monetizing it second, which is a description of a product it intends to keep.

Two weeks earlier, on October 15, 2026, Google announced changes to AI Overviews and AI Mode that move inline links higher in the answer, add a box highlighting one or two official sites for a task, and expand news carousels. That update was aimed at publishers who have said the feature cuts off their traffic. It did not add a user-facing way to turn the feature off.

Google has made two concessions on scope this year. In January 2026, after a Guardian investigation found AI Overviews giving unsafe medical answers, Google removed the summaries from certain health searches. And in June 2026, a Munich regional court issued a temporary injunction against Google after an AI Overview falsely described two publishers as scammers, ruling that the summaries are Google's own statements rather than quotations. Neither case changed how AI Overviews appear for ordinary searches.

What has Google said about people disliking AI Overviews?

There is a persistent rumor that Google has internally admitted the feature was a mistake. We could not find a public record of that. What is on the record:

• In May 2026, on The Verge's Decoder podcast, Pichai reviewed a live AI Overview for "best Chromebook" and said it was "more opinionated than it should be," adding that the product has room to improve. That is the strongest critical statement any Google executive has made about the feature's output.
• On October 29, 2026, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said on Reddit's earnings call that Google search referrals to Reddit fell by more than one million per week on average during October, and that US daily active users declined for the first time since the company's IPO. He said the AI Mode "does not drive traffic, not for us and not to anybody." Reddit's stock fell about 18% in after-hours trading, and the company said it will test logged-in-only access in some markets.
• Google's AI Overviews FAQ, unchanged since 2024, still describes the feature as something that cannot be turned off.

The practical takeaway is that complaints from users and publishers have shaped the details of the feature, such as where links appear and which health queries are excluded, but they have not produced an off switch and are unlikely to. If you want Google without the AI layer, the methods above are the answer, and the udm=14 search engine is the one worth setting up today.

What else is Google switching on by default?

AI Overviews are one piece of a wider pattern. Google turned on Gemini features in Gmail by default in January, and in October 2026 it changed its privacy policy so that connected Gmail, Drive and Photos data can shape the ads you see through Search's Personal Intelligence. If you are cleaning up your Google settings, these guides cover the rest:

• How to turn off Gmail's AI features, including the two Workspace toggles most guides miss
• Does Google use Gmail for ads? The October 2026 privacy policy change
• Sign in with Google: pros and cons
• How to turn off AI on Windows, Samsung, Meta and Alexa for everything outside Google

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can't I turn off AI Overviews in Google settings?

Because Google classifies AI Overviews as part of the Search results page, in the same category as knowledge panels, rather than as an optional feature. Its help documentation says they cannot be turned off and suggests the Web filter instead.

What is udm=14?

It is a parameter in Google's search URL that selects the "Web" results view, which shows text links only. Adding it to a custom search engine in your browser makes every address-bar search skip AI Overviews, AI Mode and most other result boxes.

Does the -ai trick still work in 2026?

As of October 2026, yes, on desktop and mobile. It is undocumented, so treat it as a convenience rather than a guarantee. It also excludes any page that mentions "AI," which can hide useful results on technology topics.

Is the Bye Bye Google AI extension safe?

It is a widely covered, free extension from a named developer, and its only job is to hide elements on Google results pages. Like any extension, it needs permission to read and change those pages. Install it from the official Chrome Web Store or Mozilla add-ons listing, not from a third-party download site.

How do I turn off AI Mode in Chrome?

Right-click the address bar and uncheck "Always show AI Mode shortcuts." To remove the button entirely, open chrome://flags, search for AI Mode, set the omnibox entry point to Disabled, and relaunch Chrome.

Does turning off AI Overviews stop Google from using my searches?

No. These methods change what you see, not what Google records. To limit what Google keeps, turn off Web & App Activity at myactivity.google.com, or search through a privacy-focused engine such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage.

Will Google ever add an official off switch?

Nothing Google has said suggests it. The company is adding ads to AI Overviews and AI Mode and reports record query growth from them. The workarounds in this guide are the realistic path, and the udm=14 method has stayed stable since 2024.