Google Says AI Overviews Can't Be Turned Off, but Adding udm=14 to the Search URL Skips Them Every Time

Google’s wording leaves no switch to find. “AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature, like knowledge panels. Features cannot be turned off.” The next sentence offers the way around it: “However, you can select the Web filter after you perform a search. This filter displays only text-based links without features like AI Overviews.”

That works one search at a time. Click Web, get blue links, search again, get the summary back.

Ernie Smith at Tedium wrote down the shortcut on May 17, 2024. “All you have to do is add ‘udm=14’ to the search URL.” Tedium set up a single-page site, udm14.com, for it, and described the result as “a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus.”

To make it permanent in desktop Chrome, add a site search under Manage search engines and site search. Chrome’s help page says to fill in the “URL with %s in place of query” field, and its own example is http://www.google.com/search?q=%s. Use https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 instead, then pick Make default from the menu next to it. Every address-bar search now opens in the Web view.

Firefox added the same option in version 140. Its Firefox 140 release notes say you can now “go to Settings > Search > Add (below the search shortcuts table) to manually enter a search URL.” The same URL works there.

The trade is real. The Web view is links, and Google’s page says it drops “features like AI Overviews,” so the other boxes Google adds on top of results go with it. The parameter isn’t in Google’s help pages either, which means Google can change what 14 does without telling anyone.

Watch for whether Google ever lists udm=14 in its own help pages, or quietly changes it. Either one tells you how it sees the people who opted out.