You can get rid of AI overviews in Google Search

If you’ve searched for something on Google recently, you may have noticed a wall of text that appears before the actual search results. This feature, called AI Overviews, offers an AI-generated answer to certain queries. But it also pushes your list of links further down the page, which makes scrolling a bit annoying when you want to do your own research – and it will get even more annoying when Google starts inserting ads into it.

But even though Google doesn’t let you disable the feature, there are some ways around it.

One of the best ways to “turn off” the feature is to reset your browser’s default search engine options. The website tenbluelinks offers instructions on how to do this in Chrome on Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac, as well as Firefox on Windows and Mac.

• In Chrome on Windows or Mac, go to Settings > Search engine > Manage search engines and site search.
• From there, select To add next to the “Site Search” section.
• Add a nickname for your non-AI version of Google in the “Name” section, add a shortcut, and paste this URL: google:baseURLsearch?q=%s&udm=14.
• When finished, click To save or To add. Then select the three dots next to the input and choose Make default.

The next time you perform a search, you will no longer see AI overviews.

There are some other simple ways to avoid AI overviews, including with Origin of uBlock. A Reddit user found You can avoid the feature by downloading the uBlock extension to your browser. You then go to the settings menu, go to the My filters section, paste google.com##.GcKpu in the list and select Apply changes.

And finally, if you just want to avoid AI overviews occasionally, you can do your research and select More > Web for a list of sites without AI overviews (and without ads).

Any of these methods should give AI search results pause – at least until Google throws an “off” switch.