Opt out of AI Overviews page by page: Google's 3 March 2027 UK deadline

Summary. Paragraph 4.b of the UK Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) publisher conduct requirement, imposed on Google on 3 June 2026, obliges Google to let publishers withhold individual pages from the grounding of AI Overviews and AI Mode. It comes into force nine months after the notice, on 3 March 2027; directory-level control and the rest of the requirement apply from 3 December 2026. As of 1 November 2026 Google has not published how the page-level control will work. Today you have three tools. The Search Console control, available to all websites worldwide since 31 August 2026, excludes a whole property or a URL-prefix child property from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features, and Google says it is not a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search. The nosnippet robots rule keeps a single page out as a direct input but also removes its classic snippet, and max-snippet caps how much text can be used. The March control should close that gap: the CMA's notes say opting out should not cost a publisher features such as snippets. Opting out does not remove the AI answer, only your contribution to it. Decide page by page with a holdout test, not a site-wide switch.

About this article. For publishers, SEO leads and analytics teams with UK search traffic, including Indian and US sites with UK readers. On 1 November 2026 we read the CMA's notice, interpretative notes (version 1, June 2026), final decision and compliance reporting notice, all dated 3 June 2026, with its August 2026 summary, and checked Google's features against its help and developer pages. This is general information, not legal advice, and no vendor paid for inclusion. Google may publish the page-level mechanism at any time, so re-check before acting. Researched with AI assistance and reviewed by our editorial team.

What is due on 3 March 2027, and what is still unknown

Paragraph 4 of the notice says Google's controls must let publishers effectively and efficiently withhold their content from the grounding of search AI features at directory level (4.a) and page level (4.b). Paragraph 6 brings the requirement into force six months after the notice, except paragraph 4.b, which follows at nine months. The CMA's August summary is plain: Google has until 3 December 2026, plus three more months to develop and roll out a page-level control.

Three definitions shape what the control covers:

• Search Content is publisher content collected through Googlebot or any Google crawler that crawls the open web for general search.

• Search generative AI features are AI features offered within general search, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. The Gemini app falls under broader generative AI services, where the CMA expects Google to adapt the Google-Extended control.

• Grounding is described in the summary as formulating and fact-checking responses.

The obligation covers outputs shown to people or businesses located in the UK, and a publisher is any party that makes content available on the web. The final decision says all publishers benefit to the extent their content is used in outputs shown to UK users, so an Indian, US or EU site has the right for its UK audience.

What the record says about the design

The final decision shows how the page-level control was argued over:

• Google confirmed page-level controls were feasible but said they needed nine months, warned of harm if the industry settled on a different standard, and argued that requiring them to be automatable, interoperable or fast-acting would not support effectiveness and would be disproportionate.

• Google also said page-level controls would mean constant recrawling. The CMA said it had seen no evidence of increased crawling, wrote the effective-and-efficient test into the legal text, and said it will engage further with Google during implementation.

• Two publishers proposed a tag-based mechanism like those Google offers in other contexts. The CMA noted that Google already offers comparable granularity, citing its supported meta tags page, and that Google could in principle offer several controls.

None of that confirms the mechanism: it could be an on-page tag, a robots directive, a URL list in Search Console or something else. Google's documentation, updated on 21 October 2026, still lists the Search generative AI control as site-wide and names no page-level option. The interpretative notes add that if alternative industry standards emerge, the CMA will consider whether paragraph 4 remains appropriate.

The compliance reporting notice requires Google to describe each control's scope, function, granularity and technical basis, any controls it is developing, how it checks they work (adversarial testing is the CMA's example) and usage data such as the number of pages or sites covered. The first report is due on 3 January 2027 and the second, the first whose period includes the page-level date, on 3 July 2027. The CMA expects to require public versions.

The dates below come from the two CMA notices, the reporting notice and Google's announcement.

Every control you can use, today and from March 2027

The table draws on the CMA's notice and notes, and Google's control, robots and crawler pages.

• Inheritance. A property inherits from its closest parent that has stopped inheriting, so you need a verified URL-prefix property for each path you want to treat differently.

• Speed. Google says a change generally takes a few days: content is excluded within one to two days after the control goes live, and some takes longer because of caching and propagation. For on-page preview rules, Google warns that crawling can take from several days to several months.

• Training is separate. The site control does not affect AI training, and Google's help page points to Google-Extended to limit training of the models behind Search AI features. The crawler documentation describes the token as covering Gemini training, and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI.

• A shared signal is coming. On 30 October 2026 Google said it plans to support a shared training signal based on IETF AIPREF work, with user-agent: __usage_ai-training in robots.txt, in early 2027. Our guide to AIPREF and robots.txt covers it.

Why nosnippet is not the page-level opt-out

Google's robots specification says nosnippet removes the text snippet and video preview from all forms of its results, including web search, Images, Discover, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and stops the content being a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

That is a page-level AI opt-out of sorts, but it comes with three costs:

1. You lose the classic snippet. A blue link with no description is a weaker result.

1. It is all or nothing for text. max-snippet softens this, but Google says the limit does not apply where a publisher has separately granted permission, for example through in-page structured data or a licence agreement with Google.

1. It depends on recrawling. The tag works only after Googlebot sees it.

The CMA's notes point the other way. Google must not make adverse changes whose purpose is to present opted-out content differently in general search, and opting out should therefore not cost a publisher features such as snippets. So the March control should remove a page from AI grounding while leaving its classic listing intact, though Google has not documented it yet. Until it ships, nosnippet is the single-page lever short of noindex, and it fits only pages where you would give up the snippet anyway.

data-nosnippet works at a finer grain, on span, div and section elements, and Google advises against adding or removing it with JavaScript. Use it to keep a proprietary data table or paywalled excerpt out of snippets while the rest of the page stays eligible.

Which pages to opt out: the trade-offs

Google's help page says that if you exclude your site, content from other sites stays available in those features and may look similar to yours. Your page leaves the answer; the answer still appears.

In Pew Research Center's analysis of 900 US adults' browsing in March 2025, users clicked a link inside an AI summary on 1% of visits to pages with one, and clicked a traditional result on 8% of those visits, against 15% on pages without a summary. Excluding a page gives up its share of that 1% and its brand visibility in the answer. On our reading it does not restore the 15%, because the summary still shows.

Google says clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, meaning people are more likely to spend more time on the site. Weigh both claims against your own data; our guide to the CMA AI Overviews metrics covers the click data the CMA expects from 3 December 2026 and how to baseline it.

The positions below are our starting judgements, not rules. The licensing row reflects the CMA's framing of the controls as giving publishers stronger bargaining power.

Four more factors belong in the decision:

• Rank protection has limits. Paragraph 9 of the publisher requirement, from 3 December 2026, and paragraph 4.a of the fair ranking rule, from 17 December 2026, protect your classic UK rankings. Paragraph 9 targets ranking signals whose purpose is to downrank opted-out content, and the CMA accepts that Google may not control every second-order effect. Our explainer on the CMA fair ranking requirement covers the second protection.

• Discover may be bundled. The site control covers AI features in Google Discover. Google has not said whether the page-level control will.

• Gemini is outside it. Search controls do not reach the Gemini app; Google-Extended governs that.

• Negotiation is allowed. Google does not breach paragraph 9 if it promotes the benefits of being included, or negotiates an agreement about a publisher's use of the controls.

Worked example: a holdout test on 40 glossary pages

The numbers are illustrative, not client data. A UK-facing B2B publisher has 40 glossary pages with similar traffic. Once the page-level control ships, it opts out 20 pages (test) and leaves 20 alone (control). It compares four weeks before the switch with four weeks after a one-week settling period, using UK-filtered Search Console and GA4 data.

The arithmetic:

1. The control worked. Test AI impressions fell from 30,000 to 600, a 98% drop, while control pages held steady. The residual 600 suggests propagation lag and should fall towards zero.

1. Rankings held. Average position did not move on test pages, consistent with the anti-retaliation rule.

1. Click cost. Test clicks fell 5.0% (4,000 to 3,800); control clicks fell 2.0% (4,200 to 4,116). The difference-in-differences is 5.0 minus 2.0, or 3.0 percentage points. Applied to the test baseline: 4,000 × 3% = 120 clicks over four weeks, or 6 clicks per page.

1. Conversion cost. Key events fell 1.3% on test pages and 2.4% on control pages, a difference of +1.1 points. No measurable loss.

Reading: for these pages, leaving AI answers cost about 120 visits over four weeks and no measurable conversions. If the aim is to protect licensable definitions, that is a cheap trade. If the pages exist to bring in top-of-funnel visitors for retargeting, revert. With 20 pages a side and four weeks of data, treat a 3-point gap as directional and run a second cycle before rolling the decision out to similar templates. Check Google's ranking-change notices for the test window too, since a notified change during the test would confuse the result.

A rollout runbook for page-level control

1. Inventory and tag. Add a CMS field per URL (include or exclude), a reason code, an owner and a review date.

1. Use directories first. From 3 December 2026, put whole sections that share a decision behind the directory-level control or a URL-prefix property. Keep page-level control for exceptions.

1. Treat duplicates consistently. Google's generative AI report assigns most data to the canonical URL. Apply the same setting to the canonical and to every parameter, AMP or print variant, or you will misread the data.

1. Get sign-off for licensed and regulated content. Editorial, legal and commercial owners should agree before you exclude pages covered by a licence.

1. Ship in batches and log them. Record the date, the URL list and how the control was set. If the mechanism is on-page, check with the URL Inspection tool that Googlebot sees it, then request recrawling.

1. Keep a rollback. Know how to revert a batch in one change, and how long re-inclusion takes once Google documents it.

1. Review quarterly and after any notified ranking change or new AI feature.

How to monitor the switch

If UK rankings drop after an opt-out and the evidence points to the opt-out rather than a notified change, keep the paper trail and tell the CMA at searchsms@cma.gov.uk or through a trade association, as its summary invites.

Outside the UK: India, the US and the EU

The site-level control and generative AI report reached all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026, according to a note added to Google's June announcement. Our July 2026 explainer on the opt-out toggle described the UK test; the control has since gone global.

The page-level control is legally required only for outputs shown in the UK, and Google has not said whether it will ship worldwide. If it does, Indian and US publishers get the tool without the same legal backing. Paragraph 2 of the notice limits paragraphs 3 to 8 to UK outputs and does not list paragraph 9, and the final decision says that paragraph answers fears that using the control in the UK could bring downranking elsewhere. That has not been tested, so outside the UK treat Google's own statement as your main protection, alongside your own test data.

We found no equivalent publisher rule in India as of 1 November 2026. EU publishers should also watch the AIPREF signal Google plans to support in early 2027.

How eCorpIT can help

eCorpIT is a Gurugram-based technology organisation, founded in 2021, assessed at CMMI Level 5 and MSME certified, with senior-led engineering teams working across AWS, Microsoft and Google platforms. Our data and analytics services team can build the page inventories, holdout tests and Search Console, GA4 and server log monitoring described above. Talk to us at /contact-us/.

Last updated: 1 November 2026.

References

1. Notice under section 19(1): Publisher Conduct Requirement, 3 June 2026 — Competition and Markets Authority

1. The publisher conduct requirement (summary), August 2026 — Competition and Markets Authority

1. Search generative AI control — Search Console Help

1. Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet and X-Robots-Tag specifications — Google Search Central

1. Interpretative notes in relation to the Publisher Conduct Requirement, 3 June 2026 — Competition and Markets Authority

1. Publisher Conduct Requirement: final decision, 3 June 2026 — Competition and Markets Authority

1. Control the content you share on Search — Google Search Central

1. Latest documentation updates, 21 October 2026 entry — Google Search Central

1. Publisher CR compliance reporting notice, 3 June 2026 — Competition and Markets Authority

1. Notice under section 19(1): Fair Ranking Conduct Requirement, 17 June 2026 — Competition and Markets Authority

1. New opportunities, control and insights for website owners, 3 June 2026 (updated 31 August 2026) — Google

1. Google's common crawlers — Google Crawling Infrastructure

1. AI features and your website — Google Search Central

1. Supporting a shared AI training control for websites, 30 October 2026 — Google Search Central Blog

1. Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, 22 July 2025 — Pew Research Center

1. CMA secures fairer deal for publishers and improves Google search services in UK, 3 June 2026 — Competition and Markets Authority

1. Generative AI performance report (Search) — Search Console Help