You Can't Turn Off Google's AI Search, But You Can Avoid It More Easily With These Settings

Of all the AI features, Google's AI search functions are probably the most pervasive. Typing any question into the search engine brings up an AI overview that attempts to answer your query — whether you want it to or not. Worse, the overview rarely cites its sources well, making it hard to verify its claims, which are frequently misleading or outright false.

Google doesn't allow you to completely remove AI from your searches, but there are some settings changes and tricks you can use to remove as much of it as possible. The simplest trick is adding "-ai" to the end of your searches to remove the AI overview. Putting a hyphen directly before any words in a search query serves as a NOT command that tells Google to filter them out. That does mean you need to type "-ai" for each search, but it's reliable so long as what you're searching for doesn't actually involve the term "AI."

You can also use the Web filter, which operates like the Images, News, and Videos tabs we're all familiar with and typically shows you only webpages that relate to your search. If you don't see it underneath the Search bar, you can find it under the More tab. It's even possible to make this the default if you use Google Chrome.

To make the Web filter your default, you'll need to do the following:

1. Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines or locate Search engine in Chrome's settings.
2. Scroll to the "Site search" section and click the Add button.
3. Give your site search a name, which can be whatever you want.
4. Repeat the name in the "Shortcut" field. This can technically be anything, but repeating the name is simplest.
5. Paste {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14 into the final box and hit Save.
6. Click the three-dot menu button next to your new search engine (you may have to click Additional sites to see it), then choose Make default.

Once you've done this, any Google searches you type into the search bar will take you to the Web tab instead of the All tab, which is the one that shows way more AI overviews. That said, there are some drawbacks. You won't see things like top news stories or Wikipedia summaries (what Google calls Knowledge Graph cards) in the Web tab, and I've noticed since setting it up that my search bar recommendations are way more limited and I can no longer use my search bar as a calculator.

Still, it feels like a small price to pay given the numerous issues with AI from privacy concerns to its devastating environmental impact. Studies show that AI is impacting users' brains, leading to mental fatigue and causing critical thinking skills to atrophy. Even AI proponents concede there are plenty of things you should never use AI for. For those of us who are tired of automatic AI features that we can't opt out of, tricks like -ai and Google's Web filter are frustrating and inconvenient, but they are useful nonetheless.