Two weeks ago, an IT administrator for an elementary-middle school took to Google’s support forums requesting a way to block students from seeing AI Overviews—the chatbot-generated answers at the top of search results.
“This seems counterproductive to what we’re trying to teach,” the administrator wrote. “Students need opportunities to navigate search results, examine sources, and draw their own conclusions rather than being handed an AI-generated synthesis before they’ve even started.”
No one from Google responded to the concern, which has been bubbling up for years. But counterparts from three districts voiced similar frustration and pointed to workarounds they were employing or considering to block AI Overviews in lieu of an official “off” switch. Their expertise is about to be in demand.
Google announced on Tuesday that it is declining to provide schools an option to disable AI Overviews. Instead, starting next year, schools will have to block access to search altogether to get rid of the feature. The decision has stunned educators, parents, and technology researchers across the US.
“We were flabbergasted,” says Dominique Johnson, part of an Oregon community group called Lake Oswego Parents For Responsible Technology. “This move makes things even more difficult for school districts that have determined AI is harmful to foundational learning.”
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment. But in a public response to the controversy shared on X, the company contended that schools will now have “more choice, not less” because search, its Gemini chatbot, and Gemini Notebook tool will be off by default starting next year. Administrators can enable one, two, or all three services.
The issue for schools and parents, though, is that Google considers AI Overviews and a companion feature called AI Mode inseparable from the traditional search experience. Respectively launched in 2023 and last year, they bring the functionality of AI chatbots, such as Gemini or ChatGPT, directly into search results.
“Kids are already using these search-bar summaries to skip real effort, pulling instant math answers and letting AI write their essays,” Johnson says. “To make matters worse, these AI snapshots frequently make mistakes and output false facts, which younger students take as absolute truth.”
The AI-generated responses are tempting to read and often good enough to trust, triggering headaches beyond classrooms. Wikipedia, news websites, and education tools have lost human visitors as people rely on overviews. Google uses the same bots to crawl the web for its search and AI products, making it impossible for publishers to opt out of their content being used for the latter.