The tech company on Tuesday announced plans to turn off AI tools in its software for students, which can be reversed by a school administrator’s decision. Google said the change would enable K-12 classrooms to have more control over how students engage with AI.

But if a school restricts AI entirely, its students will no longer be able to use Google’s Search feature. 

A social media post from Google clarifying the changes, which will be implemented early next year, explained the feature was meant to provide schools with “more choice, not less” by creating the option for administrators to enable Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Search. However, Google’s Search function is embedded with AI Mode and AI Overview that cannot be disabled, meaning schools with AI bans are unable to grant students access to the tool.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who issued a one-year moratorium on generative AI for public schools through eighth grade, was among politicians and policy experts criticizing the inextricable integration of Google Search with AI tools. The move, critics said, was a means of taking advantage of its monopoly to push use of its AI features.

“Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools,” he wrote on social media on Wednesday. “No corporation should have the power to dictate how we teach our children. Our public schools exist to serve students, not to grow the profit margins of Big Tech.”

Experts who study technology use in classrooms had slightly different responses, suggesting that Google’s AI-laden Search feature could actually have an adverse impact on its goal of being used in classrooms in the first place.

“I’m guessing from a business angle, they’re just doubling down as much as they can to try and force people to use AI,” neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath, told Fortune. “But from a pure learning angle, why?”

What are the potential unintended consequences of Google’s AI Search?

U.S. schools have spent more than $30 billion as of 2024 to provide laptops to students, with Google’s Chromebooks being among the most ubiquitous. By 2017, the low-cost computers accounted for more than half of digital devices sent to classrooms. More classrooms using Chromebooks was lucrative for Google, too, and as of 2025, education represented 60% of Chromebook’s global market share, which totals $14 billion.

An internal presentation from the company in November 2020 said exposing students to Google’s interface would create future customers (“You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.”) A Google spokesperson said at the time the documents “mischaracterized our work.”

But the reality of how AI is being used—or rather limited—in the classroom could threaten Google’s classroom presence to begin with. Jose Antonio Bowen, a consultant on technology in the classroom and a former president of Goucher College, explained in an email to Fortune that AI subverts the process of learning—which requires working hard—so many teachers are encouraged to use it sparingly, such as for teachers to create lesson plans, not for students to look up information.

“What Google and other companies seem to be doing is streamlining and integrating AI (surely reducing internal costs) and that might work in other realms of AI use,” Bowen said. “But this makes AI an outlier in use: Yes, most people will find AI search useful for most cases, but in education it can’t be unfettered access.”

Horvath, a longtime critic of the unchecked use of technology in classrooms, suggested Google’s decision not to allow users to turn off AI Mode or AI Overview from Search could actually incentivize more classrooms to turn back to analog research tools.

“I guess maybe this is a good thing in the sense that now it will force schools to think twice before just going to Google when it comes time to do research: Maybe go to a book. Maybe go to the library,” he said.

Bowen noted Google Search’s structure could also open doors for companies like DuckDuckGo, which has positioned itself as an AI-free search engine because it can automatically turn off AI summaries and filter out AI-generated images in private searches.

DuckDuckGO founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told Fortune in an email he’s seeing more companies putting AI into features “making it increasingly impossible to turn off.” Weinberg said that after Google announced in May it would overhaul Search and integrate it with Gemini 3.5 Flash, DuckDuckGo saw a tripling in traffic to its no-AI search page, which has since remained elevated.