You Can Turn Off AI on Your Google Account, but at a Cost. Here’s What You Lose

Google is now an AI-first company and it shows virtually all of its products today. What started as a chatbot, (Bard, and now Gemini), is now in Gmail, Docs and pretty much everything that Google provides. And for some people, it’s a total AI-overload. If you’re in this camp, you’re actually in luck, because Google gives you an option to turn off AI across its products tied to your account. Doing it just takes a couple of clicks. 

There’s a catch, though, and it might be a dealbreaker. While you can turn off AI features across your Google account, it comes at a cost that might not be worth it for everyone. The settings for disabling AI are also tied to features you’ve probably relied on for years — even before Gemini was a thing.

Below, we’ll show you how to turn off AI features in your account and what you’ll end up sacrificing as a result.

Turn off Google Workspace smart features

Turning off Google Workspace smart features will have an immediate impact, but it won’t remove Gemini icons from the services. After all, Google needs a way for you to easily enable Gemini again — whether intentionally or by accident. 

Disabling Google Workspace smart features will strip away a lot of AI features from Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides. It will also take away features that you might not want to give up, too. Do you like it when Google Calendar pulls an event in directly from Gmail? That’ll be gone. Priority sorting in Gmail? No more. You’ll also give up personalized search when using Google, making results less relevant to you. 

If you’re determined to move forward, here’s how to do it:

• Sign in to your Gmail account
• Click the settings icon
• Click See all settings

Under the General tab:

• Scroll down to Google Workspace smart features section
• Click Manage Workspace smart feature settings

Click the two toggles to off for:

• Smart features in Google Workspace
• Smart features in other Google products 

That’s it. This small tweak in settings should substantially reduce AI in your Google account and its apps. 

What about AI Overviews?

If you thought that disabling the smart features above would rid you of Google’s AI Overviews, think again. There are a couple of things you can do to reduce their appearances, though. 

Disable the Google Labs experiment

One way to reduce AI Overviews is to disable the experiment within Google Labs. This won’t necessarily disable all AI Overviews, but it’s a box that shouldn’t go left unchecked. 

• Go to Google while signed into your account
• Click on the Labs icon (beaker), if available
• Scroll down to AI experiments
• Click on the AI Overviews and more experiment
• Use the toggle on the right to disable the experiment

Personally, turning off this experiment made no difference when performing a search, although the feature is available in more than 200 countries, so it’s anyone’s guess what that toggle actually does. 

Add ‘-ai’ to your Google Search

The Google Labs experiment may reduce some AI Overviews in search, but there’s still no official way to disable the feature completely. Still, one simple trick seems to have better results, and that’s just adding “-ai” to the end of your search query. Generally, this will do the trick, and it works on desktop and mobile. 

Read more: Customize Your Google Search Results With This New Feature

If you want something a little more involved for a bigger payoff, you can also set up a Google Search web filter. And of course, you can always use a different search engine or web browser.

Blake has over a decade of experience writing for the web, with a focus on mobile phones, where he covered the smartphone boom of the 2010s and the broader tech scene. When he’s not in front of a keyboard, you’ll most likely find him playing video games or watching horror movies.

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