The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,860 other subscribers
«
»

Turning off AI during Google Search with the “new” UDM parameter

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/17

It looks like I missed that Google has added a new URL parameter to its search engine quite a while ago.

In the past, you could turn on image search using the tbm=isch URL parameter (“to be matched” and “image search”).

That still works, but there is a new parameter on the block that is officially undocumented, and can be used to switch into various search modes including image search but also AI-less search.

This drastically lowers the carbon footprint and also gets you far less speculative information.

Edit 20251023: I forgot to save the below part before the scheduled post got published. So here we go

This blog post is instigated by a future blog post (scheduled next year) Felienne Hermans asks herself and us: Where, o where, has equality in tech gone? Her article referred to [Wayback/Archive] Consumentenbond – Google dringt AI te veel op and she mentions

It’s nice that they mention the tip to use “-AI,” to make the hallucinations will stay away!

which was a mangled translation of

Fijn dat ze wel de tip noemen om “-AI” te gebruiken, dan blijven de hallucinaties uit!

I checked the article she referred, but there is no “-AI” in it. “-AI” is neither in [Wayback/Archive] Consumentenbond: vertrouw niet zomaar op AI-antwoorden van Google and [Wayback/Archive] Consumentenbond waarschuwt voor ‘rammelende’ AI-antwoorden van Google | Economie | NU.nl which also refer to “Consumentenbond – Google dringt AI te veel op”

So in order to prevent the “-AI” hallucination to spread further, I wanted to figure out how to force Google Search to skip AI searching as most of those results are hallucinations in part or even in full.

By bye tbm= parameter, hello udm= parameter

The first result of the first query was [Wayback/Archive] How to Turn Off Google AI Search: Get Back to Classic Search Results (extra mark-up mine)

The key to turning off Google AI Overviews lies in a URL parameter. Specifically, udm=14. Using this parameter in the instructions below, you’ll set up Google’s search to eliminate the AI Overview, ads, and everything else that clutters the search results. It’s like getting back to the Google search results we once knew and loved.

We’re not sure what UDM stands for. However, after testing the UDM parameter by changing the numeric value, we found it can do some other interesting things with Google search. Read to the end to see what they are.

…

  1. In the Add Site Search window, create a Name like Google No AI.
  2. Enter “https://google.com” in the Shortcut field.
  3. Enter “{google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s” in the URL with %s in place of query field and select Add.

…

Our research found some other URL UDM parameters, which perform different Google search types.

  • udm=15: Attractions search
  • udm=18: Forums search
  • udm=28: Shopping search
  • udm=36: Books search
  • udm=44: Visual search or image search
  • udm=48: Exact matches only

A more complete list is at [Wayback/Archive] Every Google &udm=? in the world (June 2024; also at [Wayback/Archive] Every Google &udm=? in the world. Appends udm=14 to the Google search URL… | by Terry Tan | Medium and [Wayback/Archive] Every Google &udm=? in the world – DEV Community) but I found their lists quite unreadable so I replaced it with this set of table and lists and amended it from [Wayback/Archive] The Mystery of the Google UDM (And Why it Matters for SEO) which is more recent (August 2025) but lacks geographic information.

Many udm values have no known meaning or region. I marked those with ?

udm parameters, meanings and groups
udm= meaning valid region group comment
udm=0 ? ? seems to be the search including AI
udm=1 places group 3
udm=2 images group 1
udm=3 products group 3
udm=4 perspectives ? deprecated
udm=5 lodging group 3
udm=6 learn group 1
udm=7 videos group 1
udm=8 jobs group 3
udm=9 product sites group 2 experimental
udm=10 job sites group 3 deprecated
udm=11 place sites group 3 local directory sites
udm=12 news group 1 automatically replace udm with “tbm=nws”
udm=13 airline options group 3 deprecated; moved to https://www.google.com/travel/flights
udm=14 web group 1 “web” category menu, commonly described as “No AI mode”
udm=15 attractions group 1 “Things to do” category menu
udm=16 ? ? deprecated
udm=17 ? ? deprecated
udm=18 forums group 1
udm=19 ? ? deprecated
udm=20 ? ? deprecated
udm=21 ? ? deprecated
udm=22 ? ? deprecated
udm=23 ? ? deprecated
udm=24 ? ? deprecated
udm=25 ? ? deprecated
udm=26 ? ? deprecated
udm=27 ? ? deprecated
udm=28 shopping group 1 USA only?
udm=29 ? ?
udm=30 ? ?
udm=31 flight sites group 3 deprecated
udm=32 trains group 3 deprecated
udm=33 buses group 3 deprecated
udm=34 transport sites group 3 deprecated
udm=35 ? ?
udm=36 books group 1
udm=37 products group 1 deprecated
udm=38 videos ? deprecated
udm=39 short videos ? deprecated
udm=40 ? ? deprecated
udm=41 ? ? deprecated
udm=42 ? ? deprecated
udm=43 ? ? deprecated
udm=44 visual matches group 1 Images?
udm=45 ? ? deprecated
udm=46 ? ? deprecated
udm=47 ? ? deprecated
udm=48 exact matches group 1 Images?
udm=49 ? ? deprecated
udm=50 SGE AI overview ? “AI mode” category menu, US only
udm=51 homework ?
udm=52 ? ? deprecated
udm=53 ? ? deprecated
udm=54 ? ? deprecated
udm=55 ? ? deprecated
udm=56 clean results ? deprecated (minimalist mode, simplified HTML code, without AI results)
udm=57 ? ? experimental
udm=58 ? ? experimental
udm=59 ? ? experimental
udm=60 ? ? experimental

Note that udm=60 is the

latest available udm parameter at time of writing this article (August 2025), all tries of above numbers automatically redirect with deletion of udm parameter.

Region group 1

This should be all countries. The list is from the “Every Google &udm=?” article mentioned above. On my TODO list is to make this more readable (like splitting it into continents) but that requires quite a bit of time which I currently lack.

Canada (ca), United States (us), Mexico (mx), Belize (bz), Costa Rica (cr), Cuba (cu), Dominican Republic (do), El Salvador (sv), Guatemala (gt), Haiti (ht), Honduras (hn), Jamaica (jm), Nicaragua (ni), Panama (pa), Puerto Rico (pr), Trinidad and Tobago (tt), Argentina (ar), Bolivia (bo), Brazil (br), Chile (cl), Colombia (co), Ecuador (ec), Guyana (gy), Paraguay (py), Peru (pe), Suriname (sr), Uruguay (uy), Venezuela (ve), Andorra (ad), Monaco (mc), San Marino (sm), Switzerland (ch), United Kingdom (uk, gb), Vatican City (va), Albania (al), Belarus (by), Bosnia and Herzegovina (ba), Moldova (md), North Macedonia (mk), Russia (ru), Serbia and Montenegro (rs), Ukraine (ua), Bahrain (bh), Egypt (eg), Iran (ir), Iraq (iq), Israel (il), Jordan (jo), Kuwait (kw), Lebanon (lb), Oman (om), Palestinian Territory (ps), Qatar (qa), Saudi Arabia (sa), Syria (sy), United Arab Emirates (ae), Yemen (ye), Algeria (dz), Angola (ao), Benin (bj), Botswana (bw), Burkina Faso (bf), Burundi (bi), Cameroon (cm), Cape Verde (cv), Central African Republic (cf), Chad (td), Comoros (km), Congo (cg), Democratic Republic of the Congo (cd), Djibouti (dj), Egypt (eg), Equatorial Guinea (gq), Eritrea (er), Ethiopia (et), Gabon (ga), Gambia (gm), Ghana (gh), Guinea (gn), Guinea-Bissau (gw), Ivory Coast (ci), Kenya (ke), Lesotho (ls), Liberia (lr), Libya (ly), Madagascar (mg), Malawi (mw), Mali (ml), Mauritania (mr), Mauritius (mu), Morocco (ma), Mozambique (mz), Namibia (na), Niger (ne), Nigeria (ng), Rwanda (rw), Senegal (sn), Seychelles (sc), Sierra Leone (sl), Somalia (so), South Africa (za), Sudan (sd), Swaziland (sz), Tanzania (tz), Togo (tg), Tunisia (tn), Uganda (ug), Western Sahara (eh), Zambia (zm), Zimbabwe (zw), Kazakhstan (kz), Kyrgyzstan (kg), Tajikistan (tj), Turkmenistan ™, Uzbekistan (uz), Afghanistan (af), Bangladesh (bd), Bhutan (bt), India (in), Maldives (mv), Nepal (np), Pakistan (pk), Sri Lanka (lk), China (cn), Japan (jp), Mongolia (mn), North Korea (kp), South Korea (kr), Taiwan (tw), Brunei (bn), Cambodia (kh), Indonesia (id), Laos (la), Malaysia (my), Myanmar (mm), Philippines (ph), Singapore (sg), Thailand (th), Timor-Leste (tl), Vietnam (vn), Australia (au), Fiji (fj), Kiribati (ki), Marshall Islands (mh), Micronesia (fm), Nauru (nr), New Zealand (nz), Palau (pw), Papua New Guinea (pg), Samoa (ws), Solomon Islands (sb), Tonga (to), Tuvalu (tv), Vanuatu (vu), American Samoa (as), Christmas Island (cx), Cocos (Keeling) Islands (cc), Cook Islands (ck), Faroe Islands (fo), Gibraltar (gi), Greenland (gl), Guam (gu), Hong Kong (hk), Macao (mo), Netherlands Antilles (an), Niue (nu), Norfolk Island (nf), Northern Mariana Islands (mp), Pitcairn (pn), Saint Helena (sh), Svalbard and Jan Mayen (sj), Tokelau (tk), Turks and Caicos Islands (tc), United States Minor Outlying Islands (um), Virgin Islands, U.S. (vi), Antarctica (aq), Bouvet Island (bv), Heard Island and McDonald Islands (hm)

Group 2

Anguilla (ai), Bermuda (bm), British Indian Ocean Territory (io), Cayman Islands (ky), Falkland Islands (fk), Montserrat (ms), South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (gs), Turks and Caicos Islands (tc), Virgin Islands, British (vg)

Note: this list looks like British Overseas Territory islands in various parts of the Atlantic Ocean.

Group 3

Aruba (aw), Austria (at), Belgium (be), Bulgaria (bg), Croatia (hr), Cyprus (cy), Czech Republic (cz), Denmark (dk), Estonia (ee), Finland (fi), France (fr), French Guiana (gf), French Polynesia (pf), French Southern Territories (tf), Germany (de), Greece (gr), Guadeloupe (gp), Hungary (hu), Iceland (is), Ireland (ie), Italy (it), Latvia (lv), Liechtenstein (li), Lithuania (lt), Luxembourg (lu), Malta (mt), Martinique (mq), Mayotte (yt), Netherlands (nl), New Caledonia (nc), Norway (no), Poland (pl), Portugal (pt), Reunion (re), Romania (ro), Saint Pierre and Miquelon (pm), Slovakia (sk), Slovenia (si), Spain (es), Sweden (se), Turkey (tr), Wallis and Futuna (wf)

Note: these are either European countries, or overseas parts of European countries

tbm=isch alternative is udm=2

Contrary to the first table, image search is not udm=44 but in fact udm=2.

I never noticed that tbm=isch had been phased out and later automagically be replaced with udm=2. The main reason is that I always had parameters like these at the end of the query, and with just a few extension icons active, web browsers hide the tail of the URL field after page load..

But now I can finally replace

https://www.google.com/search?q=Jeroen%20Wiert%20Pluimers&tbm=isch

or even better

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=Jeroen%20Wiert%20Pluimers

with

https://www.google.com/search?q=Jeroen%20Wiert%20Pluimers&udm=2

or even better

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=Jeroen%20Wiert%20Pluimers

Note that most of the time, neither can be saved in the Wayback Machine or Archive Today any more: Google hates archiving by others than themselves shortly after they removed the Google Cache feature and recommended the Wayback Machine.

It is the reason that the queries below all use DuckDuckGo.

Note that:

Search results without AI: use udm=14 or udm=56?

In my experiments, only udm=14 is reliable, as udm=56 is showing more and more AI results over time.

Via

[Wayback/Archive] Google’s ‘udm=56’ parameter unlocks cleaner and alternate search views : sysadmin I learned that the udm=56 option has stopped functioning.

But it also had a comment leading to extensions that work great:

Examples URLs:

Note that udm=56 seems archivable at least in the Archive.is archive:

Unified Data Model is a different UDM

Edit 20251024: added this section

It is confusing that Google also uses the UDM abbreviation for the Unified Data Model that is part of the back-end side of their Google Cloud security operations API.

Some links:

The real meaning of UDM?

Edit 20251024: added this section

I found only two links coming up with a name for UDM: the above mentioned [Wayback/Archive] The Mystery of the Google UDM (And Why it Matters for SEO) has

…

Since UDM is not mentioned in any official Google Search documentation, we can only speculate about its true meaning. Based on its behavior, I suspect that UDM stands for User Display Mode.

…

This corresponds to [Wayback/Archive] Restore Classic Google Search with this Simple Hack | Confer Australia

…
UDM stands for “User Display Mode” (at least, that’s the best guess—Google’s not exactly chatty about it). When you tag &udm=14 onto the end of a Google search URL, it tells Google: just show me real web results. No AI summaries. No shopping boxes. Just actual links.

This sneaky little URL parameter surfaced around May 2024, quietly announced on Google’s Search Liaison account.

…

Mobile’s trickier. If you’re on iOS, an app like Custom Search Engine lets you override Safari’s default, redirecting your searches to the web-only version. On Android, if you’re stuck with the Pixel Launcher, you can’t change the search bar’s engine (classic Google move). But third-party browsers like Firefox or Brave do let you set up custom search URLs—and have their own widgets, too.

The Confer Australia article does neither mention the link to that May 2024 information nor the name of Google’s Search Liaison. So I did a bit of digging (see queries below) and found out that back then Danny Sullivan was Google’s Search Liaison but has since then stepped down:

The first link got me to the Google Search Liaison Mastodon and Twitter accounts, which now are defunct:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Danny Sullivan | Google Search Central Blog  |  Google for Developers
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Google Search Liaison (@searchliaison@mastodon.social) – Mastodon
  3. [Wayback/Archive] Google Search Liaison: “This account is no longer active…” – Mastodon
  4. [WaybackSave/Archive] Google SearchLiaison on X: “This account is no longer active. Please follow @googlesearchc for information for site owners and @Google for the latest updates.”

Luckily Danny Sullivan is still active on Twitter, and the old Google Search Liaison tweets have not been deleted, so I found the May 2024 links [Wayback/Archive] Danny Sullivan on X: “Since I joined Google, I’ve just been a boy standing in front of the search group asking it to love a Web filter. So happy to see it’s arrived – congrats to the hard-working team on this project that through their own efforts made it a reality!”

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Google SearchLiaison on Twitter: “We’ve launched a new “Web” filter that shows only text-based links, just like you might filter to show other types of results, such as images or videos. The filter appears on the top of the results page alongside other filters or as part of the “More” option, rolling out today”
    1. [Wayback/Archive] GNkKf-DacAA26HU.jpg:orig (706×283)
      Web filter on mobile

      Web filter on mobile

    2. [Wayback/Archive] GNkISLVacAAol8m.jpg:orig (1029×332)

    [WaybackSave/Archive] Tweet JSON

  2. [Wayback/Archive] Google SearchLiaison on Twitter: “We’ve added this after hearing from some that there are times when they’d prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they’re looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based”
  3. [Wayback/Archive] Google SearchLiaison on Twitter: “As I see some questions, on mobile (the first screenshot) we tend to show all filters, including this new Web one. You don’t need to go to “More” for it. On desktop (the second screenshot), filters that seem most relevant are dynamically shown. Any filter you want that doesn’t”

    [Wayback/Archive] Refine Google searches – Google Search Help

[Wayback/Archive] Thread by @searchliaison on Thread Reader App – We’ve launched a new “Web” filter that shows only text-based links with the full text in one page.

Note of the Google information mentions the udm parameter, nor its meaning.

Other search parameters

From [Wayback/Archive] Google Search Parameters (2024 Guide):

  • The q parameter
  • The hl parameter
  • The gl parameter
  • The lr parameter
  • The cr parameter
  • The tbs parameter
  • The source parameter
  • The ei parameter
  • The ved parameter
  • The gs_lp parameter
  • The iflsig parameter
  • The ibp parameter
  • The kgmid parameter
  • The si parameter
  • The sxsrf parameter
  • The uule parameter
  • The sclient parameter
  • The tbm parameter

[Wayback/Archive] Using the TBS (or equivalent parameter) in Google Custom Search – Stack Overflow

Queries

  1. [Wayback/Archive] remove ai from google search at DuckDuckGo
  2. [Wayback/Archive] google search udm parameter at DuckDuckGo
  3. [Wayback/Archive] google search udm parameter -udm=14 at DuckDuckGo
  4. [Wayback/Archive] Google “udmSearch” meaning at DuckDuckGo
  5. [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google Suche (tbm=isch with %20 space escapes redirected to udm=2 with + space escapes – note the archival to the Wayback Machine consistently fails)
  6. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google-søk (udm=2)
  7. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers at DuckDuckGo (tbm=isch)
  8. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers at DuckDuckGo (udm=2)
  9. [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google Suche (tbm=nws)
  10. [WaybackSave/Archive] Bevor Sie zur Google Suche weitergehen (Jeroen Wiert Pluimers search with udm=12 cannot be properly archived)
  11. [Wayback/Archive] google search udm parameter list at DuckDuckGo
  12. [Wayback/Archive] “Google Search” “UDM” “Parameter” “Unified Data Model” at DuckDuckGo
  13. [Wayback/Archive] “udm” “user display mode” at DuckDuckGo
  14. [Wayback/Archive] Google’s Search Liaison account 2024 at DuckDuckGo
  15. [Wayback/Archive] “Danny Sullivan” “2024” “udm” at DuckDuckGo
  16. [Wayback/Archive] Google’s Search Liaison account “May” “2024” at DuckDuckGo
  17. [Wayback/Archive] “Danny Sullivan” “May” “2024” at DuckDuckGo
  18. [Wayback/Archive] danny sullivan google search may 2024 at DuckDuckGo
  19. [Wayback/Archive] danny sullivan google search at DuckDuckGo
  20. google search tbs is – Google Search (could not be archived)
  21. [Wayback/Archive] google search tbs is at DuckDuckGo

--jeroen

This entry was posted on 2025/10/17 at 18:00 and is filed under AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Chrome, Chrome, Chromium, Development, Edge, Firefox, Google, Google AI, GoogleSearch, LLM, Mastodon, Power User, Reddit, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, URL Encoding, Web Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

«
»