In the past few years, companies you use daily have found many opportunities to volunteer you for features you didn’t ask for — and, as of late, it feels like they’re almost always AI features you didn’t ask for.
That’s not always a bad thing! Sometimes new tech includes features that are really innovative and useful. But sometimes you just want a service to work the way it did before — such as your trusty, reliable search engine prior to the introduction of Google’s AI overviews at the top of every search query.
Luckily, some folks on the internet have found reliable workarounds (that we tested) to purge your search results of unwanted AI influence. Here’s how to circumvent the overview:
The On-The-Spot Method
One method to avoid AI results — that won’t entirely rule them out from all of your searches — is to add “-AI” or “-ai” at the end of your search.
This approach is similar to other ways you can augment your search results (e.g., putting specific phrases in quotes). It’s a simple action to rule out AI overview results without doing much or making the change permanent.
So, for example, if you’re looking for information on norovirus, you could search “norovirus symptoms -ai” to get results without the overview.
The Backend Opt-Out Method
Another method for Chrome users, which was highlighted by Yunaluvgames on Instagram last month and Android Authority late last year, lets you more efficiently cut the overviews from the results of your daily searches, ensuring you’re only seeing the AI overview when you want to see it.
First, go to your Chrome browser’s Settings and select “Search Engine” or go to chrome://settings/searchEngines in your search box.
Open “Manage Search Engines and Site Search” and select “Add” under Site Search.
Enter this information into the new fields (pictured below):
- Name: AI Free Web
- Shortcut: @web
- URL with %s in place of query: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14
You’ll now see AI Free Web in the list of search engines, clicking the three stacked dots to the right of it will give you the option to “Make Default.”
You can make this same AI Free Web change to FireFox as well by adding that same information after going to Preferences and then Search.
And then you’re done — and your search results should now filter out any AI results you might not want to see. Unfortunately, there aren’t many simple workarounds of this kind supported for mobile just yet.
There are plenty of reasons you might not want the AI overview results taking over your searches.
By now, you’ve had time to develop your own opinions about AI overviews — some people find them useful for a quick, at-a-glance answer to a low-stakes query like “who is that one blond guy from ‘Buffy’?” and others are irritated by dubious sourcing and unnecessary errors.
“These AI-generated summaries are often unreliable and can feature outright incorrect or misleading information,” Andrey Meshkov, co-founder and chief technology officer of AdGuard, a company specializing in privacy and ad-blocking solutions, previously told HuffPost.
And sometimes the incorrect answers from AI could lead to dangerous (and gross) results: “For example, when searching for medical advice, the AI might generate even potentially dangerous results, like the infamous case of an AI Overview suggesting drinking urine to treat kidney stones,” Meshkov said.
Yvette Schmitter, CEO and managing partner at the technology company Fusion Collective, also previously told HuffPost she has concerns about the “opaque” nature of the service — there’s a lot that is still experimental about these features and a lot that we don’t know about how information is weighted or sources are identified.
This opens up a lot of questions from experts and users alike, Schmitter noted: “What happens if the AI summary ― which may or may not be responsive to sponsored search results ― doesn’t match the information that I’m seeing in the search results? Why is it different? What is right and what is wrong? Because these tools are entirely opaque, we have no way of knowing, which means the AI ‘feature’ adds no value.”
And if you aren’t enamored with the AI Overviews as you currently see them and want a taste of “old” pre-AI Google, these hacks might be for you.
The original version of this story was published on HuffPost at an earlier date.