Anyone using Google's search functions in the past year is bound to have encountered the controversial 'AI Overview' at the top of the screen, but one Reddit user shares a simple hack that lets you bypass this annoying feature in less than a second.
Thanks to developments with its DeepMind lab, Google has become one of the leading tech companies to embrace the AI revolution. I
t has proven to be a prominent feature of its Pixel smartphone lineup, and it has integrated the tech into a number of its primary features including Gmail.
One of the most noticeable implementations though is in search, which is what most people use Google for as the company registers a staggering number of searches every single year.
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Searching pretty much any query or request now displays a small box above all of the website results with an AI generated summary of information.
This is typically provided alongside sources of the info, although it can't necessarily always be relied on.
This, combined with some people's desire to avoid AI from an ethical and environmental perspective, has led people to look for ways to bypass the AI summaries with little results.
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Google currently gives users no way of disabling it as an option from the user settings menu, leaving many to feel that it has been 'forced' on to them no matter what they do.
However, users on Reddit have now discovered a simple hack that completely removes the potential for AI summaries in search, alongside any AI generated images too, and it takes less than a second to enable.
As shared by u/r3xxdil on the r/Google subreddit, adding "-ai" at the end of any search you make removes the AI generated summaries, instead opting for the snippet box that Google used to opt for that draws directly from sites themselves.
The example this user gives involves searching for the USA population in 2025, which when typed into Google generates an AI overview pulling the 'Worldometer' website.
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Adding "-ai" to the end of this search though completely removes the AI Overview, instead drawing directly from the Worldometer site for direct population info with previous years too.
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You can try this out with any of your searches, and after you're used to inputting it into your queries it'll likely become second nature. It's unclear whether Google intends to remove this as a feature in the future or whether its simply baked into search deliberately, but many are happy to take advantage of it while they can.
"Thank you," writes one user in the comments, "now this needs to be a setting already." Another adds that they have "been loving this feature for the past couple weeks or so," so it's clearly a popular discovery.
If companies like Apple are to be believed though we could be nearing the end of traditional search engines like Google as people increasingly favor AI models like ChatGPT for their queries, leaving Google in the dust.