Google's AI Search Results Vanish with a Well-Placed Expletive

Swear at Google Until It Hides AI Search Results

Are you tired of the annoying "AI overview" at the top of your search results? Turns out you can get rid of it by starting your search with the word "fuck." The trick spread thanks to a now-viral thread on Tumblr and it works wonders. I've been trying it out all morning: the AI disappears but the results are otherwise more-or-less the same. Is this the best way to stop seeing AI in search results? No. We've talked about how to disable Google's AI search results by changing the default search engine in your browser to only pull in web results, and that's better. But is this the funnest way to stop seeing AI in search results? Fuck yeah it is. And it's perfect if you sometimes want to see AI results, but need a way to exclude them on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, when you search, you want a quick answer. AI results in search are potentially useful for this. Sometimes, though, what you're looking for is a deep dive on a particular issues written and curated by actual experts. AI results, in that context, are mostly just cluttering your search results. Turns out you can blast them out of your search results with a strategically placed f-bomb. I don't know specifically why this works, but I assume it's some filter Google set up to avoid situations where the AI swears at users. It's particularly funny because this is how people use profanity in real life. Comedian James Acaster once explained the reason he started swearing during standup in one of my favorite bits. He realized that by not swearing he "attracted a demographic that I hate." The point: saying "fuck" every now and then can means people who don't like profanity won't engage with you. This trick, apparently, also works with bots: swear liberally and they won't interact with you. Welcome to the fucking future.

"Just give me the f***ing links!" -- Cursing disables Google's AI overviews

If you search Google for a way to turn off the company's AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can't be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off "fucking Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top. The existence of this "curse to disable Google AI" trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars' own testing. For instance, when searching for "how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results," a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like "dumb" or "lousy" did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect. There's long been evidence that Google's Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

Google's AI overviews can be bypassed with this simple trick -- but it's NSFW

When Google introduced AI Overviews in May of last year, it was met with hilarious backlash as the Overviews pulled information from blatantly trolling Reddit posts or spoofed articles from across the web. Google backpedaled from the AI-powered search results but has slowly been reintegrating Overviews. Not every search will bring up an AI Overview, but if you're looking at turning them off on the ones that do, a well-timed F-bomb turns them off, revealing a standard search page. The trick appeared on BlueSky and other social platforms this week, with people saying you could "insert a curse word" in your search to make AI summaries disappear (via Ars Technica). We gave it a go, and the trick appeared to work. We tried it with a couple of different prompts: "How do you remove AI overviews?" and "What is Tom's Guide?" Those questions will likely prompt Google Search to add an AI Overview summary in your results. As you can see, the AI summary pops up without curse words. The Tom's Guide search seems to include summaries from our LinkedIn page, website and a Tom's Hardware Wikipedia page. The removed AI search seems to be pulled from Google's how-to page, which is summarized immediately below the Overview. And here's what happens when you add a cuss word. The results appear to be a more standard page of results. Whether or not the links are helpful is up for debate, which immediately leads to a Reddit link, which is not always helpful. But as any veteran Google searcher knows accurate information can be several links down. Allegedly, Google's AI tools don't use cuss words or try to avoid using them. It's possible that adding in a "fuck" or "shit" to your search triggers the AI's safety protocols which in turn stops the AI summaries from appearing. We should note that using cuss words does change how Google searches and might bring up things that are not safe for work. If you don't want cuss words to dictate your search, there are other methods for searching Google without the intrusion of AI. You can append &udm=14 to your search URL that removes AI Overviews and Web snippets. You can also go here, and it will automatically do it for you. A more SFW addition is to put a minus sign at the end of your search with any set of words, though most recommend using "-ai" (sans the quotes). Still, cussing at the AI, which has been shown to give misinformation and occasionally dangerous results, feels pretty good.

Want better Google search results? Start swearing

Experiments show that being a potty mouth can help you find relevant info faster, without AI jank in the way. I think it's fair to say that people are frustrated with Google these days between the deluge of advertisements and AI-powered results of questionable utility. Normally, swearing at your computer only helps in a placebo effect, but it turns out that throwing in an F-bomb might actually improve the quality of Google search results. Heads up, there's going to be a lot of swearing in this article. Absolutely none of which I will enjoy. I'm definitely not giggling like a third grader while I write this, nope. Ars Technica reports that the latest tech tip making the rounds on social media is that you can disable Google's Gemini AI-powered search overviews if you add some casual cursing to your search query. Some cursory testing shows that, indeed, modifying your query in this way generally gets rid of the AI Overview. But after a bit of experimentation, I've found that this may or may not translate into meaningfully better results. For example, a Google search for "how to see sold items on ebay" (which I needed for my last PCWorld article) showed the AI Overview, followed by the wrong eBay page, followed by the "People also ask" Google module, followed by the right eBay page (a community forum post). Changing up the query to "how the fuck do I see sold items on ebay" showed me a YouTube video with a guy making a weird face (which seems to be about 60 percent of YouTube content these days), followed by the same "People also ask" module, and finally a relevant Reddit thread. Both searches gave what I would call "okay" info in a format I didn't want, and required scrolling to find the actual information I needed in a straightforward way. For "how to replace ram," I got an AI Overview followed by a Crucial guide and then a Reddit thread. Pretty good, no scrolling necessary to find info from an authoritative source. Interestingly, "how the hell do I replace ram" gave me a lengthier AI Overview, followed by a bunch of YouTube videos, then that pesky "People also ask" module, then Reddit. An objectively poorer result. Going a little harder into the PG-13 zone, "how do I replace my goddamn ram" gave me no AI results, a Reddit thread (with the expletive removed automatically), followed by the "People also ask" module, then a CyberPowerPC video on YouTube. That's a good result if you want instant text-based information, but I'd say it's about even for the original query in actual utility. Let's try one more, a little less focused on tech. "How to poach an egg" gave me an AI Overview, a rather long Downshiftology blog post pointing to a YouTube video, the "People also ask" module (I'm really starting to hate that thing), a bunch of YouTube videos, a Recipes module, then finally a Serious Eats page with a "Jump to recipe" button at the top. A decent bit of scrolling required. "How the fuck do I poach an egg" gave me a list of instructions immediately, apparently scraped from The Pioneer Woman. That's a definite win for the potty-mouth searcher. So it looks like cussing the sky blue at Google might improve your results for some searches, in the same way that adding "reddit" to your query could get you to information coming from actual humans a lot faster... but it's not a universal cheat code. There's also the relatively new Web view, which gets rid of auto-generated modules for most searches.

Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries

If you are tired of Google's AI-powered search results leading you astray with poor information from bad sources, there is some good news. It turns out that if you include any expletives in your search query, Google will not return an AI Overview, as they are called, at the top of the results page. For instance, if you search "How large is the student body of Yale University?" the search results page will return a large AI-generated blurb above the blue links. If you instead search, "How large is the fucking student body at Yale University?" you will instead get a standard list of blue link results, sans-AI summary. This is not the first time internet sleuths have discovered a way to disable Google's AI-powered results. Other methods are more complicated, however, like adding a specific string of characters to the search results page URL. This method of swearing and pleading at Google to "just give me the fucking links" is much more cathartic. We are going to go out on a limb here and say that if people are regularly finding techniques to disable AI summaries in Google searches, perhaps that means they do not want them in the first place? Google search results have never been perfect, of courseâ€"there is still a lot of poor information across the web. But AI summaries present users with a prominent blurb at the top of their search that looks authoritative when it just risks compounding the misinformation problem with more erroneous slop. It is the same way Siri has been made worse by its integration with ChatGPT. At least in the past, when the voice assistant did not know how to answer a question it would just throw users to the web. Now Siri offers up ChatGPT-generated responses instead, sometimes spitting out incorrect nonsense instead of admitting it is not sure. But this is all being forced on users whether they like it or not. From Google Docs to X and Instagram, there are AI buttons and search boxes and dropdowns everywhere now, because every tech company needs to have an AI strategy. Is a basic keyword search too much to ask? When Google first introduced AI Overviews into search, it went viral for returning nonsensical responses, such as suggesting that one can prevent cheese from sliding off their pizzas by using glue or improve gut health by eating pebbles. It is believed Google's model sourced the information from Reddit comments. AI does not know how to identify sarcasm or satire. Ars Technica earlier reported on the new loophole, which, if we are speculating, is caused by Google's overly cautious steering of its AI model. Whereas a bot like xAI's Grok is more than happy to swear and discuss sensitive topics, Google's Gemini keeps it PG. Google has likely trained Gemini to avoid repeating expletives, so it simply is disabled in search when a curse word is present in order to avoid that. Google has argued that AI Overviews, as they are called, do not reduce traffic sent to websites because users will view summaries and be interested in delving deeper into the source material after finding something of interest. That logic has not comforted media companies, which have been litigating the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity for ingesting their content into large language models. We imagine Google will close the expletive loophole eventually, but in the meantime, if you are sick of AI, you now know an easy way to avoid it. Just tell Google to give you the fucking links.

Want to turn off AI Overviews? Just start swearing at Google

Including profanity in your Search query appears to work quite well at immediately turning AI Overviews off. "Enough with this @!#?@! AI nonsense, already!" With as ubiquitous as artificial intelligence-powered systems have become over the past couple years, and considering how their performance sometimes leaves us a little wanting, it should be no surprise that plenty of people are interested in disabling AI where possible. After Google brought AI Overviews to Search last year, we learned about some tricks for turning AI Overviews off, such as by appending some special characters to the URL in your browser. Now we're hearing about one that's damn easy to use, and a lot more damn convenient than fiddling around with your damn address bar: cursing.

Here's a Fun Way to Disable Google AI Overviews While Searching

Don't Search for Block Breaker on Google Unless You Want to Waste a Lot of Time Google's AI Overviews are definitely a work in progress and have been panned for providing incorrect, and even dangerous, information. If you don't want to worry about seeing the feature, there is a f***ing fun way to turn it off. Insert Any Curse Word Into Your Search Query Making the rounds on social media, and highlighted by Ars Technica, you can just insert any curse word of your choosing into the search query to disable an AI Overview. I was a bit skeptical, but in just a few minutes I confirmed that the trick did work. To begin, I searched "where do i place my outdoor camera" and received the search results with the usual AI Overview at the top of the page. Searching for "where do i place my f***ing outdoor camera" provided a search results page without the AI Overview. I tried multiple search queries and the trick worked each and every time. I could enter a variety of curse words, more than just the f-bomb, anywhere in the search query to disable the AI. Adding other weaker adjectives like "useless," didn't disable the AI Overviews. There's no obvious reason why cursing in the search query would disable the AI Overviews. Even so, it's a unique way to relieve some pent-up stress while hopping on Google to find something. There Are Other Ways to Disable the AI Overviews If you'd rather not curse at Google, there are a number of other ways to disable seeing the AI Overviews. Some ways are simple, and just take a few seconds, like installing a Chrome extension or selecting More > Web from the Google search bar. Other ways take some more time, like creating a custom search engine. But if you're in a pinch, and don't want to hassle with seeing possibly incorrect information, adding a curse word is simple and fun.