Google won’t let schools turn off AI Overviews without losing Search

Google is giving schools a switch for its AI tools, but not the one many of them asked for. Administrators who run Google’s education accounts will be able to turn Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Google Search on or off for their students. What they cannot do is keep Search and switch off AI Overviews, the chatbot-written answers that sit above the links. A school that wants its students away from AI answers has to give up Google Search altogether.

That matters because Google is the default way into the web for a huge share of classrooms. In schools that hand every student a Chromebook and run homework through Google Classroom, picking another search engine is not a settings toggle but a district decision. Teachers who want pupils to compare sources before they read a summary now face a blunt choice: AI answers, or no Google at all.

The change was announced by Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager of education, in a blog post that said access to Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search “will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.” The post lists Search alongside the company’s AI products. Phillips spelled out the consequence to The New York Times, as TechCrunch reported: “Search and AI are deeply integrated,” he said, so students at schools that do not opt in “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”

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Google presents the change as more control. In a post on X, the company said its announcements “give schools more choice, not less,” because all three services start switched off and schools can enable them one at a time. Alongside the new controls, Google is adding Guided Learning, a mode that coaches students through a problem with questions instead of handing over the answer. It is available in Google Classroom worldwide now, and a Search version starts as a pilot in select US schools later this month.

The switch educators actually asked for does not exist. Two weeks before the announcement, Wired found, an IT administrator at an elementary-middle school asked on Google’s support forums for a way to block AI Overviews. “Students need opportunities to navigate search results, examine sources, and draw their own conclusions rather than being handed an AI-generated synthesis before they’ve even started,” the administrator wrote. Nobody from Google replied. Accuracy is part of the worry. A Washington University in St. Louis study cited by Wired found that only about 42 percent of AI Overviews could be fully verified from the citations they contained. Google says the overviews go through rigorous testing and keep improving.

Building that switch is possible, but keeping it would cost Google something. “It’s a question of whether they’re committed to maintaining two versions of search in the long run,” Nicole Kerson, a former senior Google Search product manager, told Wired. “It’s very hard to maintain a forked product like that.” Microsoft, by contrast, offers a Chrome extension that turns off AI-generated summaries in Bing. Some districts have built their own fixes: Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia developed a browser extension, and others rewrite search addresses. Those workarounds can stop working whenever Google changes how it delivers results.

Rivals see an opening. DuckDuckGo, which runs a version of its search engine with AI answers turned off, pointed schools to instructions for changing their default search engine, and its chief public affairs officer, Kamyl Bazbaz, wrote on X: “Forcing AI on school children: how a monopolist behaves when they think people are powerless. Prove Google wrong.” The ground Google is defending is large. By the company’s own past figures, around 50 million Chromebooks are in schools, and Google Classroom has more than 150 million users worldwide.

Google has not set a date. Its post says it will share specifics with schools “in the coming months ahead of the changes rolling out,” and Wired reports that the new defaults arrive next year. The post applies the change to K-12 student accounts without naming any countries, and Google has not said whether the timing differs outside the US. Until it ships, and probably after, the only off switch for AI Overviews in a Google school is the one that turns off Google.

Tags: Folarin Balogun, Google, Gemini, education, AI Overviews, DuckDuckGo

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