Turn off Google AI Mode? What Still Works?

Views: 36

Google launched AI mode in search this week and with it, we lost some of the ability to turn it off. What still works?

AI mode Switch in Labs

• Open Chrome and ensure you are signed in to your Google Account with Incognito mode turned off.
• Click on the “Labs” icon at the top of the page and navigate to “Manage.”
• Toggle the option to turn off “AI Overviews and more.” and “AI Mode” top left.

Even after doing the above, it appears that some searches still trigger AI mode overviews.

Adding -ai to Searches

Adding “-ai” to a keyword search no longer seems to work sometimes. It appears to depend on if you are logged in, and have the switch in Labs to on.

Swearing at Google

The so called “STFU Google” mode used to stop AI results, but it no longer does. (This shouldn’t stop you from swearing at Google, as it has health benefits)

&udm=14

The udm=14 tricks seems to still work. Simply add &udm=14 to any query string, and it strips out the ai overviews.

Then there is also a website dedicated to this feature call (you guessed it) UDM14.org where you can just fill out a search box and go:

Most modern browsers will allow you to change search engine definitions.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

Click on Web

Click the “web” tab on Google to get fully clean results with out the AI injection. This can be buried under the “more” tab as well.

If you can’t set a browser string, there are plenty of extensions to do it for you. See also, this post on how to set SearchGPT as your default search on ChatGPT.

A chrome extension to do it.