You know the feeling. You head to the internet to Google something- a common curiosity you stumbled across, a tech question, or advice about treating a cold- and think you’ll get your answer almost immediately. But when your search comes back, it’s clogged with irrelevant AI slop and other information that seems hardly related to your initial query.
Some sites are starting to let you filter this out. LinkedIn recently introduced a “Feels like AI slop” button you can use to report posts and Pinterest allows you to turn off some of the AI results. But is there a way to do that on a major search engine? The answer is yes— with a little tweaking, you can get it to return better search results.
You just have to know how to utilize Google Verbatim.
What Is Google Verbatim?
According to Alex Barrientos at Gadget Review, once you’ve made your initial search and deemed the results useless, you can refine it. In its default setting, he explains, Google “corrects spelling, swaps synonyms, personalizes based on your history, and sometimes makes entire words optional—like asking for ‘vinyl records’ but getting results about ‘pictures of albums’ instead.” If you switch to the Verbatim Mode, it “shuts down this helpful chaos, returning only pages containing your exact words in the exact order you typed them.”
How Do I Use It?
As you’re looking at your search results, you should see the heading “Tools” to the far right of your screen (at least on a desktop). The second option on that menu is “All Results” and if you hover over it you can see the options “All Results” and “Verbatim.” Click verbatim and your search results should refresh and be a much better sampling of answers to your initial query.
Barrientos says that there’s no one button you can push to force Google to default to Verbatim Mode every time, but he does propose a solution so that you don’t have to click for it every search: a custom browser. If you feel tech-savvy enough to go for it, he suggests that you “create a custom search engine in your browser settings. Add a new engine called “Google Verbatim” with the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&oq=%s&tbs=li:1. Set a keyword like ‘gv’ if you want.” “That tbs=li:1 parameter forces Verbatim mode automatically,” explains Barrientos.
Source
The One Google Search Setting That Removes 90% of Useless Results, Gadget Review, 2025.
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