Google’s “AI Overviews” is, in theory, quite helpful. It directly answers your search query by scraping the internet for viable answers before creating a collage of its findings that it presents as its definitive take on your question.
It’s often incorrect and a waste of time. You’ve probably wasted even more time trying to find a way to disable it, only to find out that you can’t—at least not easily. Luckily, some people have found a clever workaround for ensuring that the AI Overviews don’t appear: curse like a sailor in your search query.
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How to Disable Google AI Overviews: The Profanity Hack
Let’s say you want to see who’s starring in the new Fantastic Four movie. If you were to type “Who is playing Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four movie?” You might get an AI Overviews answer.
But if you don’t want to deal with that stupid AI bullshit at all and, instead, find an answer written by a human being from a viable trusted news source, you could potentially type something like “Who the fuck is playing Reed Richards in the fucking Fantastic Four movie?”
Google’s AI Overview has no idea what to do with curse words, so it just reverts to its default mode of giving you links. The technique has been gaining traction online around social media and various tech sites, like Ars Technica, have tested out to find that it does indeed seem to work.
Now, there are less profane methods of excluding AI Overviews, but they tend to be a little too technical or cumbersome for the average person to work into in their day-to-day Google searching habits. The easiest of which seems to be rather simple and all you have to do is type out your query and then add “-ai” to the end.
That’s a minus symbol plus the letters AI. If you didn’t know, adding a minus symbol in front of a keyword at the end of your Google search query is a handy little way of filtering that keyword out of your results.
So, if you wanted to find out the cast of the new Fantastic Four movie but didn’t want an AI answer but also didn’t want Google to get confused with the casts of the four previous fantastic four movies, you could theoretically, type something like “Who the fuck is playing Reed Richards in the fucking Fantastic Four movie? -ai -1994 -2005 -2007 -2015”
Does anyone else think the internet died a long time ago and we’re all just shuffling around in its corpse?