Frustration grows over Google’s AI Overviews feature, how to turn it off

Since Google enabled its AI search feature, many people have tried and failed to disable the often incorrect AI preview feature in regular search results. Unfortunately, you can’t. There are, however, ways to disable it using a new “Web” search mode, which we explain below.

AI Overviews, also known as Search Generative Experience, is Google’s new search feature that summarizes web content using its internal LLM (Large Language Models).

Google says AI previews only appear when the search engine believes it can provide more value than traditional blue links.

When you’re logged into Google and search for general topics like how to install one of the recent Windows 11 updates, Google’s AI will rewrite content from independent websites and summarize it in its own words.

This feature may sound good in theory, but Google’s AI integration has several quality issues, including causing a slight delay in generating the response and, more problematically, sometimes displaying incorrect information.

For example, Google AI Overviews recently asked researchers to drink two liters of urine when asking how to get rid of kidney stones quickly.

Although initially released as an opt-in Search Labs experiment, Google recently began rolling out AI previews to everyone in the United States, whether they like it or not, and other countries will do so soon.

Google claims that AI previews make people “use search more and be happier with their results,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case based on numerous questions on Google’s support forum on how to disable the feature.

“I find the results very repetitive, often wrong, and they are not at all what I’m looking for but they take up so much space and are in the way. I just want them to go away,” posted a user trying to disable previews HAVE.

“Every result I’ve received from AI insights has been incorrect. I’m more than capable of misinterpreting internet articles on my own, and I can probably get at least slightly closer to actually understanding the AI because I actually have cognitive abilities process,” another user posted.

As Google forum posts suggest, early feedback on Google’s AI previews has been negative, with people finding the feature unnecessary and often misleading.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to turn it off now that it’s no longer available in Search Labs, and Google quickly locked the threads for many people asking how to do this.

While the Google Search we all fell in love with 26 years ago is no more, now filled with endless features, sponsored results, and shopping results, the company recently introduced a new “Web” search option to regain the old feeling of searching.

When using Google’s new web search, search results will no longer be cluttered with the abundance of features we usually see, including “Top Stories”, “AI Previews” and Shopping Lists .

For those who don’t want to see AI previews, we can use this new web search feature to remove Google’s AI feature.

How to remove Google AI previews

If you don’t like Google’s AI previews, you can force Google to always show web search results without summaries, videos, images, and other AI search features.

To do this, change your web browser’s search engine to a specific Google entry point that triggers the “Web” filter by following these steps:

1. Open Google Chrome, click the three-dot menu in the upper right corner and select Settings.
2. Scroll to Search engine” and click Manage search engines and site search.
3. Click on Add next to Site Search.
4. In the In the Add Search Engine dialog box, enter a name for your search engine (for example, “Google Web”). For a shortcut, enter a keyword to quickly use this search engine from the address bar (for example, “Web”).
5. ​Change URL to {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s.
6. Click on Add.
7. Click the three-dot menu next to the new search engine you created and select Default.
8. The new search engine will now appear by default under Search Engines.
9. Close the Settings page.

Now when you search from Google Chrome’s address bar, the search will be performed using Google’s new web search feature. To return to the previous Google search, simply go back to the search settings and set Google as your default search engine.

The overall process remains the same whether you use Chrome or Edge, but the location in the browser settings may be different.

If you don’t want to manually change search settings, you can also install a Google Chrome extension called “Hide AI Previews” from the Chrome Web Store.

This extension allows you to hide Google.com generative search previews without changing settings manually.

On mobile devices, you will need to install Firefox and change its search engine settings to force the entry point above.