Search Console's generative AI control: which property's setting wins
Google's help page for the Search generative AI control covers the Search Console setting that decides whether a site's content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features of Discover. The control has been available to all websites worldwide since August 31, 2026. The page spells out how the setting passes between parent and child properties, which matters to anyone running a site under more than one property.
Three choices, one default
The control sits under Settings → Search generative AI in Search Console, with three options:
- Include (the default): the site's content and links can appear in these features and help ground AI answers, and the site can receive impressions and traffic from them.
- Exclude: no links, no content and no grounding in those features, and so no impressions or traffic from them. Content from other sites, which Google notes "may appear similar to yours", still shows.
- Inherit from parent: the property follows the setting of the property above it. This is the default for any property that has a parent.
Google says excluding a site is not a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search, and does not change how content is used for AI training. That is a separate switch, the Google-Extended token. Google says a change generally takes a few days: most content drops out within one or two days of the new setting going live, and some takes longer because of caching.
Which setting applies
A property inherits from the closest parent that has turned off inheritance. If no parent has, it inherits from the top-level domain property. In Google's example, https://example.com/blog follows example.com unless https://example.com/ has its own setting. blog.example.com is a child of example.com, and example.co.uk is not. The owner of a child property can override the parent at any time, and the owner of the top-level domain property sees a notification in Search Console when that happens.
Before you exclude anything
Check what the features send first. Google points to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console as the way to estimate what changing the control would cost. If a team manages a folder or subdomain as a separate property, check whether someone has overridden the domain's choice there. A notice in Search Console is easy to miss. For tracking how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini treat the brand outside Google, an AI visibility tracker is a separate tool.