There's a clean workaround to remove Google's AI Overview summaries from your search results without browser extensions or appending -ai to every query: set your Google search region to France.
AI Overviews - the AI-generated summaries Google places above organic search results - aren't available in France, reportedly due to regulatory considerations under EU digital law. Setting your Google search region to France in your search settings causes the feature to simply not appear. The change persists across searches without any ongoing effort.
To apply it: open Google Search settings, find the region or country setting, and switch it to France. Once saved, AI Overviews stop appearing on every subsequent search. You stay signed into your account, preferences save across devices, and you don't need to touch it again.
For most searches the practical trade-off is minimal. Some local results may skew toward French sources, but general queries - product research, how-to searches, topic lookups - return the same links you'd get otherwise.
This has been confirmed working as of early June 2026. Google could extend AI Overviews to France (which would require navigating EU compliance), or add detection for region-setting workarounds - but neither is a trivial fix. The EU regulatory track in particular is slow-moving, which suggests this workaround has some runway.
Browser extensions that strip AI Overviews also exist, but they need maintenance whenever Google updates its page markup. A search settings change survives browser updates, device switches, and Google's periodic front-end redesigns.