Google Will Cut Off Search for Students at Schools That Turn Off Its AI, Saying the Two Can't Be Separated

Google is giving schools something that looks like an off switch for its AI. The catch is what else goes dark when they flip it: Google Search.

On Tuesday, Google said Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on. Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager for education, wrote that the company made the change "after listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers and policymakers."

That sounds like control handed back to schools. In practice, a district that wants no AI at all has to give up the world's default search engine on the Chromebooks and Google apps it already runs on.

One switch, two products

Administrators cannot keep Search on while turning off the Gemini-powered features inside it, and plain Google search with no AI summaries will not be offered. Phillips told The New York Times that "Search and AI are deeply integrated." Students at schools that ban AI will lose Search and see a message from their school saying it is not available. Google is cutting Search off for those schools rather than shipping a version without AI.

Phillips put it bluntly at a virtual meeting on Nov. 2. A school that "simply wants AI off," he said, has "the choice to not have Search on at all."

Admins can enable products one by one, and the settings can differ by grade. Brittany Siegal Mennuti, Google's product lead for Classroom, described a district blocking AI for one group, limiting another to Guided Learning, and giving older students "the full-fledged search experience" with the usual AI summaries. Any group blocked from AI also loses Search. That leaves administrators sorting through a new set of choices in the middle of the school year.

A retreat from August

The new defaults walk back a move Google made in August, when it switched Gemini on by default inside Google Classroom, which is used by more than 150 million teachers and students worldwide. Educators pushed back, and last month lawmakers pressed Google on the "potential harms" of its AI products in schools.

Google's answer to the cheating worry is Guided Learning, now being built into Search for student accounts. When Search detects a homework request, such as a pasted physics problem or a book report, it walks the student through the work step by step instead of handing over the answer. In the school version, teachers can read transcripts of students' chatbot conversations. A pilot starts this month in select US schools.

The controls arrive over the coming months, and Phillips said the changes begin early next year. Schools that refuse the terms may have to look at other search engines, and possibly other devices and platforms altogether.

Google has drawn the same line before. It keeps insisting its AI and its search engine are one product, and so far only a regulator has made it pull them apart: Turkey ordered Google to let news publishers opt out of AI Overviews without dropping out of regular search. Schools are getting no such option.

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