Wired shows users how to disable Google AI Overviews

Google’s search page is increasingly less a directory and more an editorial product. The latest flashpoint is “AI Overviews” — the automatically generated summaries that appear above traditional blue links. Wired this week published a consumer guide on how to hide them, a small act of self-defense that doubles as an admission: the default interface now tries to answer first and send traffic later, if at all.

According to Wired, users can suppress AI Overviews through a mix of settings, browser extensions and query tweaks, depending on region and account state. The practical details matter, but the underlying change matters more: Google is moving from indexing the web to packaging it — and in doing so, it is reassigning who captures value in the information supply chain.

For publishers, AI Overviews create a classic hold-up problem. Websites bear the cost of reporting, editing, hosting and legal risk, while the platform extracts the informational surplus and presents it as a Google-native “answer.” Even when citations are shown, the user’s incentive to click through drops. The platform becomes both wholesaler and retailer: it buys content indirectly through crawling, then resells it as an attention-saving product while paying in the soft currency of “attribution.”

This is not merely a UX dispute. It is a bargaining move. If Google can satisfy a user’s intent on-page, it reduces publishers’ leverage to demand better terms, and it reduces the market value of independent distribution. In game-theory terms: the platform is shifting the equilibrium from a two-sided market (users ↔ publishers, mediated by search) to a one-sided market (users ↔ Google), where publishers are interchangeable input providers.

The incentives point toward a degraded epistemic environment. AI summaries are optimized for plausibility and speed, not for source transparency or contestability. A list of links invites comparison; a single synthesized paragraph discourages it. The user receives a pre-digested consensus, with the cost of verification pushed onto the few who still click and read primary material.

And because the summarizer sits at the choke point of discovery, it also becomes a governance layer. The question is no longer only “what ranks?” but “what gets summarized, how, and with which caveats?” That is editorial power by default — exercised by a private company with minimal external auditability, and with strong commercial incentives to keep users inside its own interface.

Wired’s workaround culture is thus a symptom of a larger shift: search is becoming a curated explanation service. The web becomes the substrate; the platform becomes the narrator. In that world, the open internet is still technically there — just increasingly optional, like a ‘details’ tab few people open.

If publishers want to survive, they will likely be pushed toward paywalls, direct subscriptions, and tighter brand trust — the kinds of private arrangements that impose real standards because someone actually pays. The alternative is to remain a free data mine feeding an AI layer that treats journalism as training material and traffic as a rounding error.