How to Turn Off AI on Your Google Account

If you use Google's services, and you most likely do to some extent, then you're probably more than aware that Gemini is lurking around in virtually all of its products. Just like its own Pixel smartphones, Google is infusing AI into everything it creates, which can be incredibly helpful at times but also cumbersome and too "in your face" at others.

If you're trying to find ways to have a more vanilla, Gemini-less Google experience, it's technically possible. Google actually lets you disable AI with just a couple of clicks, but it's not so cut-and-dried. If you're determined to take away Google AI, you might lose other features along the way that you might actually miss.

Below, we'll show you how to reduce or disable AI on your Google account.

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. 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.

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.