Google-Extended

Google-Extended is the most misunderstood control in the AI visibility toolkit, in both directions. Some site owners block it believing they are opting out of AI Overviews: they are not, because AI Overviews and AI Mode are Search features fed by Googlebot under normal Search rules. Others avoid blocking it out of fear their rankings will suffer: Google states in its crawler documentation that the token has no effect on Search inclusion or ranking. What it actually governs is whether your content helps train and ground Gemini, so the real question is the same one GPTBot and ClaudeBot pose: do you want tomorrow's models to know your content first-hand? For most customer-facing businesses the answer is yes, and the correct action is to leave Google-Extended alone. Audit your robots.txt for a well-meaning block a developer added during the AI panic, and make sure the choice recorded there is one you made on purpose.