Fix Google By Disabling AI Search Results

It’s been a bit of an open secret for years that Google is getting worse. Search results are less relevant, with a focus on promoting larger websites as the ongoing march for SEO continues. The ‘old feeling’ of the internet as a collection of small islands of content is increasingly disappearing from the Google experience, and AI search results haven’t done anything to correct this. The recent AI summaries at the top of Search aren’t always appreciated, with many people preferring to find information themselves from sources they can more easily judge for reliability.

Thankfully, Google has recently added the ability to improve the experience by partially disabling AI search results.

Google’s AI search has been a mess

Yes, there are flaws

Google’s AI integrations were announced earlier this year at Google I/O, and proved to be a bit unexpected for the search giant. The company had been testing increased integrations for AI search for years as part of various beta programs. It was loosely expected that something like this would appear eventually, especially after the company struck an AI content licensing deal with Reddit earlier this year, but the roll-out of Google’s core search product was more surprising.

Unfortunately for Google, the results have not been good. Despite limiting the type of queries the AI overview will respond to, the integration was widely mocked online for giving a range of terrible answers – including some directly scraped from a single Reddit comment over a decade ago.

Whether Google’s AI search feature was rushed out or not, we won’t know; but Google has recently been feeling some pressure from a range of great search alternatives, including new metasearch engines which collate results from multiple AIs.

You can disable AI search results on Google

Google has added an option to disable AI search results

Whether you’ve been impressed with Google’s new search results or not, there are plenty of reasons to want to disable AI search results. Often, we’re not looking for straight-up information from a search engine, but instead actual websites or sources, or commentary around an issue.

Luckily, Google has provided a new search filter to allow users to disable their AI results. It’s accessible via the Web filter at the top of the page when searching for results. When you toggle to the Web tab, it will limit your search results to only websites, and make the entire experience a little more palatable.

If you’re keen eyed, you’ll notice that selecting this option adds a setting to your URL which adds:

[...]?udm=14&[...]

We can inject this parameter by default into any Google search, whether in your browser’s inbuilt search engine or on Google.com itself, telling Google to select the ‘Web’ page by default. How you go about this depends on how you’re searching, but we’ll run through some common options.

These tricks might not work for everyone

We should note that there is no guarantee that these tricks will work for everyone. Google is constantly A/B testing features and introducing new features and tweaks. It is possible that your experience may differ. That said, we feel that the query parameter method of disabling AI search results is the most likely to work in the long term.

Default to web only search in Chrome

Thankfully, some kind developers have already covered this one for us. There’s a Chrome extension already available which defaults your Google searches to this web tab across the board.

This works great, whether you’re searching on Google.com directly or searching in Chrome’s search bar. We should note that there are other alternatives for this. This extension is an arguably more popular alternative, but it works by modifying the page itself after it’s loaded instead of adding this filter before the query. We prefer the query parameter approach, as it’s less likely to break in the future, but both are good options.

Source: Chrome Web Store

While we haven’t tested it out here, the simplicity of this extension means that it’s highly likely to work in Edge when installed as a Chrome extension.

Default to web only search in Firefox

The situation in Firefox is similar, there’s already an identical extension available which enables Web search by default. This is the one we’d suggest from the same developer as the Chrome version.

Setting up Web Search on other search engines

Alternative routes exist

If you’re regularly using a search engine box that doesn’t have an extension, there are several things you can do. Firstly, there are great setup sites like tenbluelinks.org, which will run through the steps for modifying your browser or operating system search engines on a range of platforms to add the most relevant query parameters.

Most of these browser search engines standardize by placing the search term in a query parameter, so it’s often very easy to add a new parameter to the template URL in use. There are even options for mobile search.

Source: tenbluelinks.org

Proxy sites are another alternative

A final alternative if you can’t modify the search engine in use in your browser or OS is to use a proxy site. We wouldn’t recommend this as the best option, as a proxy site will be able to see all the queries you make on Google, and may add some latency to your queries.

These proxy sites, like udm14.com, work by simply redirecting your query from their site to Google, after having added this parameter.

Google’s AI search is here to stay

At least there are workarounds for now

Whether the current form will survive in the long term is difficult to say, but Google has been clear about one thing – AI search results are here to stay. The overall quality of search results has been declining significantly over the last decade, much to the annoyance of users lacking a clear alternative, and Google sees generative AI as the solution.

Despite several serious teething issues, and some terrible PR, the company has continued to stand by its integration of AI in search results – taking a huge reputational risk in the face of increasing competition in the search space.

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