Google's "AI Overviews" feature, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), is a raging trash fire that threatens to choke the open web with its stench. Instead of directing you to expert insights from reputable sources, Google is now putting plagiarized and often incorrect AI summaries above its search results. So when you search for medical advice, for example, the AI may tell you to drink urine to get rid of kidney stones, and you'll have to scroll past that "advice" to find links to articles from human doctors.
Unfortunately, Google does not provide a way to turn off AI Overviews in its settings, but there are a few ways to avoid these atrocities and go straight to search results. In perhaps a tacit admission that its default results page is now a junk yard, the search giant has added a "web" tab to the site so, just like you can narrow your search to "images" or "videos" or "news," you can now get a plain old list of web pages without AI, answer boxes or other cruft.
Below, I'll show you how to send your searches directly to the web tab from Chrome's address bar or filter AI overviews from the main search results tab. Unfortunately, at the moment, neither of these methods works for Chrome on Android or iOS. However, you can use a different mobile browser, such as Firefox.
How to block AI overviews when searching from Chrome's address bar
If, like me, you initiate most of your web searches from the Chrome browser's address bar, you can make a simple change that will direct all of your queries to Google's web search tab.
1. Navigate to chrome://settings/searchEngines in Chrome or click Settings->Search Engine->Manage search engines and site search.
2. Click the Add button next to Site search.
A dialog box appears, allowing you to create a new "site search" entry.
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3. Fill in the fields in the dialog box as follows then click Add.
- Name: Google (Web)
- Shortcut: google.com
- URL: {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s
4. Select "Make default" from the three-dot menu next to your new entry.
The Google (Web) engine will now appear on the Search engines list. When you enter a query in the address bar, it will direct you straight to the Web tab on Google. The real secret is that the search engine we created adds the parameter ?udm=14 to the search query.
How to block Google AI overviews using a Chrome Extension
If you like to go straight to the Google home page (google.com) to initiate your search or perhaps you like all the other items on the default search result page—videos, answer snippets, and ecomm blocks—you can download an extension that hides the AI results. The appropriately named Hide Google AI Overviews gets the job done. You just install it, and it modifies the CSS on the results page, so the AI Overviews are no longer visible.
I wish I'd thought of this. The only potential problem is that Google could easily change its code and prevent the extension from working. However, as of publication time, it works!
Of course, if you don't mind wasting an extra click, you don't need an extension. After you enter your query, just click on the Web tab. It may be buried in the "More" menu. Unfortunately, by that point, you will have already been exposed to the AI overview and other cruft.
How to block Google AI overviews on Android / iOS
While Google Chrome for the desktop makes it easy to change your address bar search or install extensions, Chrome for the phone is a different story. On Chrome for Android and iOS, you can't use extensions at all, and you can only choose from a limited group of search engines. Yes, you can select a custom search engine, but it has to be an existing engine on the Internet you've visited; you can't manually type in a search URL and, therefore, can't add the all-important ?udm=14 to the query string.
Unfortunately, neither mobile Safari nor mobile Edge allows you to manually add a search engine. However, mobile Firefox, available for iOS and Android, does have this capability. Here's how to use it.
1. Install Firefox on your phone if you don't have it already.
2. Navigate to Settings.
3. Tap Search.
4. Tap Default Search Engine
5. Tap Add search engine.
6. Fill out the fields as follows and then click Save.
- Name: Google (Web)
- Search string URL: google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s
7. Select Google (Web) from the menu.
Now, when you search from Firefox's address bar, you'll get the Google web tab.
Avram Piltch
Avram Piltch is Tom's Hardware's editor-in-chief. When he's not playing with the latest gadgets at work or putting on VR helmets at trade shows, you'll find him rooting his phone, taking apart his PC or coding plugins. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram developed many real-world benchmarks, including our laptop battery test.
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21 CommentsComment from the forums
parkerthon The entire premise that this is a misleading feature is because people don’t understand that AI can be wrong. So let’s remove useful features so dumb people aren’t so easily misled before they even understand what genAI is? Lowest common denominator in humanity wins again I guess. Why not out a warning label that nobody reads? That’s what we do for literally everything because people are too lazy to research things before using them. As it stands the web and google results are a polluted mess of AI generated content that is often wrong, I’d much rather google used AI to sniff out the genAI sites and deprioritize them. It can’t get good at that unless it is getting feedback from humans.
The concern about content creators not being compensated is very real. There needs to be some laws/standards created that specifies what is publicly reusable content for AI systems to ingest/reuse separate from publicly available information for humans to view on a site or indexing agents to crawl. I think many sites run by organizations that simply aim to provide information to consumers would not object to being ingested by google’s AI. Just today I found a technical knowledge base answer and of course still clicked down to the source where it highlighted how it summarized its answer. It saved me time and google stole nothing. So this isn’t a bad thing, its just the laws haven’t caught up yet to protect content creators that don’t want their info being published by google because then they don’t get clicks and ad revenue.
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mac_angel people still use Chrome?
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hotaru251 parkerthon said:
The entire premise that this is a misleading feature is because people don’t understand that AI can be wrong.and thats the issue.
the people who don't udnerstand this are the people who will google how to self prescribe an illness. and trust strangers answer.
got kidney stone? you need to drink piss. That has major health issues.
"ai" itself isn't bad..but it is NOT at point you should have it as default becasue its trained on an uncountable number of correct and incorrect content.
Let it mature and at a time it has a single digit flaw rate then maybe roll it out as default but as it is now no ai should be default results.parkerthon said:
I think many sites run by organizations that simply aim to provide information to consumers would not object to being ingested by google’s AI.Stack Overflow would agree with, but as it also showed the users do not like their stuff being used by ai for corpo.
tl;dr ai should be an option but never default.
Google even has settings for users and they could easily make the ai default a toggleable option to make it default for those who want it.
mac_angel said:
people still use Chrome?sadly its used by liek 60% of users who use the internet.
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JamesJones44 Is it really that big of a deal? I get that it's wrong a lot (at least in my experience), but I'm assuming it will eventually be good enough to use and for the few times it is right, it does save time.
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Alvar "Miles" Udell I use Edge and Bing so no problems with that here.
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voyteck It seems they removed hit count recently before this. Yesterday, I had to use Bing to find out how many results there were after typing in a phrase in quotes, to know if that weird phrasing (in my native language) is commonly used in a specific domain or not (I work as a copy editor.)
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salgado18 I'll give another hint: use a different search engine, especially one with privacy features like DuckDuckGo. People need to know that there are alternatives to almost anything, including to Windows.
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mcswell JamesJones44 said:
Is it really that big of a deal? I get that it's wrong a lot (at least in my experience), but I'm assuming it will eventually be good enough to use and for the few times it is right, it does save time.Have you ever heard of Louis Carroll's stopped clock? Right twice a day. The only problem is, you don't know when it's right. I leave the rest of the analogy to you.
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Air2004 'How to block Google's annoying AI overviews and just get search results'
The correct answer is , just don't use Google search.
Problem solved.Reply
1_rick hotaru251 said:
and thats the issue.I just tried searching for "ryzen 8945HS" on Google and got "people are also asking" what kind of processor is in the 8945HS. Oh, and of course a bunch of ads.
Stop using Google for search.
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