Does Google-Extended block AI Overviews?
No. It’s the most expensive mix-up in robots.txt: people block it to stay out of AI Overviews, stay in AI Overviews anyway, and give up something else instead. Registry verified 19 September 2026.
What Google-Extended actually does
| Google-Extended | Blocks Gemini model training and grounding (content fed from the Search index to Gemini at prompt time). DOES NOT remove you from AI Overviews or AI Mode, and does not affect Search ranking. If you blocked this to hide from AI Overviews, it isn't doing what you think. |
|---|---|
| Googlebot | Removes you from Google Search entirely, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, which ride ordinary Search crawling. |
The confusing bit: there is no Google-Extended crawler. Nothing ever visits your site under that name. It’s a label that only means something inside robots.txt, and Google reads it while crawling with its ordinary user agents. So blocking it can’t stop a crawl, because there’s no separate crawl to stop.
Why it doesn’t touch AI Overviews
AI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Google Search. They are built from the same index as the blue links, which Googlebot fills. Google-Extended sits outside that pipeline, so a rule for it never reaches them. The flip side is worse: blocking Googlebot does take you out of AI Overviews, along with the rest of Google Search.
The four controls that do decide it
These go in your pages, not in robots.txt, and they are Google’s own list:
noindexremoves the page from Google Search entirely, AI Overviews included. The nuclear option.nosnippetstops Google quoting the page, in regular results and in AI features alike.data-nosnippetis an HTML attribute that does the same for chosen parts of a page, say a pricing table or a members’ section, and leaves the rest quotable.max-snippetcaps how many characters Google may quote from the page.
The catch: all four shape your ordinary search snippets too. Google offers no setting that keeps you out of AI Overviews while leaving your normal results exactly as they were. If you want less of your text quoted, you get less of it quoted everywhere.
So should you block Google-Extended?
Block it if you don’t want your content used to train Gemini or fed to it at answer time. That’s a real choice, and it costs you nothing in Search rankings. Just don’t block it expecting AI Overviews to go away.
The same trick at Apple and Microsoft
- Applebot-Extended works the same way: a robots.txt-only label, no crawler. Content excluded from Apple foundation-model training. Siri/Spotlight presence unaffected.
- Microsoft has no separate AI token at all. Bingbot covers Bing and Copilot together, and Copilot is controlled with the
NOCACHEandNOARCHIVEmeta tags instead.
Check what your site says
Paste your robots.txt to see what it says to Google-Extended and every other token, or run the scan to also check for a stray noindex, which lives in the page or its headers rather than in the file.
Crawlers in this guide
- Google-Extended: Model training, run by Google
- Googlebot: Reference, run by Google
- Applebot-Extended: Model training, run by Apple
Where to go next
- Which AI crawlers should you allow?
The tokens have four jobs. Which ones you want depends on what you are trying to achieve, and the costly mistake is blocking the citation crawler when you meant to block the training one. - AI SEO setup: the five things worth checking
Five layers you can check from outside, each capable of hiding a site. We go through them in the order they tend to break. - llms.txt: what it does and doesn't do
Cheap to add and easy to oversell. What the file does, what it does not, and what the available evidence says.