PSA: if you have a website or a blog, you can use Google Search Console to turn off the use of your site in AI overviews.
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PSA: if you have a website or a blog, you can use Google Search Console to turn off the use of your site in AI overviews. You get multiple scary warnings if you try. I was curious what's the actual impact on site traffic, so I turned it off. It went from ~1k AI summaries a day to zero, with no measurable impact on visits to the site.
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PSA: if you have a website or a blog, you can use Google Search Console to turn off the use of your site in AI overviews. You get multiple scary warnings if you try. I was curious what's the actual impact on site traffic, so I turned it off. It went from ~1k AI summaries a day to zero, with no measurable impact on visits to the site.
Just to be clear, this means that I need to have a Google account in order to stop their shenanigans, right?
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PSA: if you have a website or a blog, you can use Google Search Console to turn off the use of your site in AI overviews. You get multiple scary warnings if you try. I was curious what's the actual impact on site traffic, so I turned it off. It went from ~1k AI summaries a day to zero, with no measurable impact on visits to the site.
@lcamtuf could you be a bit more specific of what is necessary here?
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@lcamtuf No such settings on a recently-claimed (DNS TXT) site. Will check again tomorrow.
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Just to be clear, this means that I need to have a Google account in order to stop their shenanigans, right?
@teun I don't *think* they expose this setting otherwise (i.e., robots.txt and meta tags only let you opt out of training or out of search altogether).
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PSA: if you have a website or a blog, you can use Google Search Console to turn off the use of your site in AI overviews. You get multiple scary warnings if you try. I was curious what's the actual impact on site traffic, so I turned it off. It went from ~1k AI summaries a day to zero, with no measurable impact on visits to the site.
@lcamtuf Hmm, that's interesting. If it was stealing traffic, I would have expected turning it off to have bumped the traffic up by at least a tiny bit.
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PSA: if you have a website or a blog, you can use Google Search Console to turn off the use of your site in AI overviews. You get multiple scary warnings if you try. I was curious what's the actual impact on site traffic, so I turned it off. It went from ~1k AI summaries a day to zero, with no measurable impact on visits to the site.
possibly totally silly question
surely it is possible to take say 1,000 pages of text, and run it thru a program that subtly alters the text into sort of nonsense, and you upload that every day
and if a lot of people did this, wouldn't it poison the AIs ?
or the AIs are now smart enough to get around this ?
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@lcamtuf Hmm, that's interesting. If it was stealing traffic, I would have expected turning it off to have bumped the traffic up by at least a tiny bit.
@Lee_Holmes Why? The AI summary still appears on top of the SERP, reducing the likelihood of people scrolling down / clicking on anything. It just can't lean on your website content anymore.
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thanks
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possibly totally silly question
surely it is possible to take say 1,000 pages of text, and run it thru a program that subtly alters the text into sort of nonsense, and you upload that every day
and if a lot of people did this, wouldn't it poison the AIs ?
or the AIs are now smart enough to get around this ?
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @lcamtuf some people implemented that, yes, generating random noise text on the fly when robots crawl them, made to took kind of like real english text from a distance, but nonsensical, i think it needs a lot of websites doing that to have a visible effect, but it might. if anything, it must make it costlier to run such crawling operations.
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