One morning your search had a robot summary on top of it. Your keyboard started rewriting your sentences. Your group chat grew a little coloured circle you can't get rid of.
One email a month. Your address, nothing else. One click to leave.
You went looking for the off switch and it wasn't there — so you assumed you'd missed it, somewhere in a settings menu six levels deep, and you gave up feeling slightly stupid.
You didn't miss it. A lot of the time it genuinely isn't there, and that is a decision somebody made on purpose.
“There is no direct ‘off’ switch in Google Chrome settings to permanently disable AI Overviews, as they are part of the core Google Search…”— Google's own Platinum Product Expert, on Google's own support forum, 28 September 2025. 767 people had marked “I have the same question.” Google then locked the thread so nobody could reply.
You're not a luddite. You probably use some of this stuff on purpose and like it. That's the point — on purpose. You chose it. What grates is the other kind: the features that show up uninvited, that read your messages to be helpful, that answer questions you didn't ask, and that quietly switch themselves back on after an update.
You want the machine to do what you told it, and nothing else. That used to just be called using a computer.
Every month we go through the updates, we sit down with real phones and real laptops, and we work out what can actually be turned off and how. Then we send you one email.
Your email address, nothing else. One click to leave, and the record is deleted.
In the order people actually go looking for it.
Every one of these gets worked out on a real device and written up as a step-by-step — and it goes out in the email, to the people on the list. That's what you're signing up for.
Some of it, yes. Google's AI Overviews can be removed with the Web filter — we've tested that and published it. Apple gives you settings. Others, like the Meta AI ring in WhatsApp, are far harder to remove, and where there's no way out we say so plainly rather than pad the page.
Because these features are treated as part of the core product rather than optional extras. Google's own product expert put it plainly on Google's support forum: there is no direct off switch for AI Overviews, as they are part of core Google Search.
No. Every step we publish is written for someone who just wants their phone to stop doing something, tested on a real device, and dated so you know it still works.
Every other page on this stuff gives you five tricks and no dates, and half of them stopped working in March. We publish a method after we've run it, and we stamp the day we ran it. When it breaks — and it will, because these companies keep shipping — you hear it from us before you find out the annoying way.
One email a month. First one goes out at the end of this month.