Google won’t let you disable AI in Search, but these tricks still work

Google has been adding more and more AI to Search over the last few years, first with AI Overviews, then with AI Mode and now a new customized search box which it calls one of the biggest overhauls in its popular search engine for the last two decades. However, not everyone is a fan of the new AI features that Google brings and some of us just want to search in peace without a hallucinated AI response ruining the experience.

Unfortunately, Google gives no official way of shutting down its AI in Search and calls AI Overviews a “core Google Search feature” similar to knowledge panels that cannot be turned off. Fortunately, there are still a few ways you can reduce or avoid AI Overviews in Google Search. Here’s the workaround we have found so far.

How to turn off AI in Google Search:

Add “-AI” to your questions:

One of the easiest ways to remove AI Overviews from your search results is by using ‘-AI’ at the end of your search query.

For example, you can search the web like ‘best gaming laptop 2026 -AI’ or ‘how to bake pizza -AI’ and similarly for other terms.

This trick works because Google Search has supported search modifiers or operators for years, which help power users search the web more precisely.

For instance, using the “site:” operator restricts search results to a specific website, while the “filetype:” operator helps users find specific document formats like PDFs or Excel while searching.

The -AI modifier works on the same principle. By adding a minus sign before a term, it sends a message to Search to exclude results related to that keyword wherever possible.

This trick may not work all the time, but it should noticeably reduce the amount of AI Overviews you see in Search results.

Turn on Web filter

Another feature Google offers to remove most of its AI elements in Search is the Web filter.

After you enable the Web filter, it gets rid of AI Overviews, shopping widgets, knowledge panels and other AI-generated clutter and takes you to the classic search results page with various links one after the other.

In order to turn on the Web filter, you just need to search Google as you normally would and in the Search bar where you see options like Images, Videos or News, click on the ‘More’ option and select Web. You should now see a more classic web search experience.

Move away from Google:

Another way to get away from all the AI-focused features of Google Search is to move over to a different search engine altogether. One of the privacy-focused options that you can switch to is DuckDuckGo, which also comes with an AI Overviews-like feature called ‘Search Assist’.

However, the key difference here is that DuckDuckGo gives users the option to completely turn off AI in Search with a single toggle.

If you want a very similar experience to Google Search, you can also try Brave Search, which uses an independent web index instead of relying entirely on results from other search engines.

While Brave has introduced its own AI Overviews-like feature called “Answer with AI”, the feature can be disabled easily from Search settings.