It’s nearly impossible to opt out of artificial intelligence entirely these days. As a tech advice journalist, I’ve heard from countless readers who were perfectly content with how their apps and operating systems worked long before the current generative AI boom took off. They have no interest in AI-written search answers, auto-summarization buttons, or built-in AI tools that offer to draft text for them—but more often than not, these unwanted features are enabled by default, and figuring out how to disable them is far from straightforward.
That doesn’t mean a mostly AI-free digital life is out of reach, though. If you don’t mind walking through a few quick setup steps, or are open to switching to apps that haven’t jumped on the mandatory AI bandwagon, you can easily turn back the clock to a digital experience that works the way you want it. Here’s how to get started:
Disable AI features in Google and other major search engines
Google heavily prioritizes AI-generated answers for search queries these days, but the company quietly added a simple workaround to suppress these AI results: you just need to add
-aito the end of every search you run. Manually typing this extra text every time is far from convenient, but if your web browser supports custom search engine configurations, you can set it up to automatically add-aito every query automatically.For example, here is the step-by-step setup for desktop Chrome:
Navigate to Settings > Search Engines > Manage search engines and site search
Click the “Add” button next to the “Site search” section
Enter
Google No AIin the name field, and setgnaias your custom search shortcutPaste the following URL into the URL field:
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Once you save the new entry, click the vertical three-dot ⋮ menu next to your new custom search entry, then select “Make default” to use this AI-free version of Google for all your searches going forward.
Disable AI features in Google and other major search engines
