Google said on Tuesday that Search, Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Gemini in Classroom will be switched off by default for K-12 student accounts until school administrators turn them on, and that a school which rejects the company’s AI altogether will lose Search on student accounts as well.
Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager of education, announced the change in a blog post titled “Designing responsible AI for learning.” The accounts covered run from the earliest primary grades through the final year of secondary school. Access to the products, the post says, will be entirely off until administrators explicitly enable them. The shift reverses a move Google made in August, when it turned Gemini on by default in Google Classroom.
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The sharpest part of the policy is the link between Search and AI. In an interview about the change, Phillips said “Search and AI are deeply integrated.” Students at schools that opt out of Google’s AI, he said, will not have access to Search and will see a message from their school saying it is not available. The blog post itself does not spell out how the controls will work or what students will see. Phillips wrote that Google will share more specifics with schools in the coming months, ahead of the rollout, so administrators have time to prepare.
Google moved to soften the reading after elected officials objected. In a clarification posted on X, the company said schools can turn Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Search on individually, and that AI Mode and AI Overviews in Search for schools will offer step-by-step guided learning through problems, so students do not get quick answers to schoolwork. The clarification did not say a school could keep ordinary Search while disabling its AI features. One technology-industry account of the controls says administrators can choose among enabling Search with AI Overviews and AI chat, enabling Search with Guided Learning, or leaving everything off. That description comes from a single source and has not been confirmed by Google.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani both criticized the plan after the first reports, according to accounts of their posts reviewed by The Eastern Updates. Both criticized Google after reports that the company would restrict Search at schools that ban AI.
The policy lands in a debate that school systems are already having. New York City and Los Angeles, the nation’s two largest school districts, restricted student access to generative AI on school devices in September, according to one account. Teachers, administrators and parents have argued over what generative tools do to academic integrity, critical thinking and exam preparation, and the decision to switch the tools off by default places that choice with schools.
Google is promoting a feature called Guided Learning as its answer to that concern. Rather than giving a complete solution or a ready-made answer, Guided Learning uses step-by-step prompts to help a student work through a problem independently. It was first launched as a study mode in the Gemini app. Google said it is now available globally in Google Classroom, and that it plans to begin testing it in Search at select US schools later this month.
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The change affects any school that runs on Google Workspace for Education and Chromebooks. Administrators who keep Search will be accepting the AI features built into it, according to one account, while those who refuse AI face the loss of Search on managed student accounts and would need to reconfigure their systems to point students toward a different search engine.
The evidence on how well such tools work for learning is contested. One analysis reviewed by The Eastern Updates said schools are weighing Google’s own evidence for Guided Learning against independent research from Stanford University and the Brookings Institution that urges caution about student dependence and durable learning. That analysis is a single account and the underlying studies were not reviewed. Google’s blog post describes the new controls as a way to let school leaders decide how AI products are used in their classrooms.
The company has drawn earlier criticism over how it introduced AI into its Workspace products. In June 2025, Workspace customers found Gemini features added to their subscriptions without an opt-out, and price increases tied to the AI features followed, according to one account of that episode.
Google said the Guided Learning pilot in Search will begin in selected US schools later in November.
