How to hide AI-generated images in search results

If you want to hide AI-generated images in search results, two engines do it for you and a third needs help. This guide gives the steps for DuckDuckGo and Kagi, what Google offers, and the blocklist route that works on any engine. Details come from each vendor's own pages as read on October 10, 2026, and every filter below is best effort.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo's help page lists three places to switch the filter on:

• Images tab: open the AI images filter and choose Hide. The results reload without AI-generated images.
• Search Settings: under General or AI Features, turn on Hide AI-Generated Images.
• DuckDuckGo browser: in Settings, then AI Features, turn on Hide AI Images.

Searching from noai.duckduckgo.com has the filter on by default and turns off DuckDuckGo's other AI features too.

How it decides: DuckDuckGo says the filter relies on publicly available blocklists, giving the uBlock Origin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist as its example, and that "these lists are not exhaustive". Images from sites that are not on a list pass through.

Kagi

Kagi's AI image filter has three states: Any (the default, which includes everything but downranks AI-generated results), None (excludes them) and Only. You can set it with a search operator: add ai:none to a query to exclude AI-generated images. Thumbnails likely to be AI-generated carry a small badge, and you can lower or block a site from the shield icon in image results.

How it decides: Kagi says it uses website reputation, not per-image analysis, because there is currently no reliable way to identify AI-generated images automatically with enough precision. It also says detection is not 100% reliable and some AI images may still appear. Kagi is a paid search engine.

Google Images

As of October 10, 2026 we did not find a setting in Google Images that hides AI-generated images. What Google offers is labelling: its About this image tool shows context and metadata for a picture, and Google says it can show whether a SynthID watermark is present, per its announcement about Photos. That helps you check one image. It does not clean a results page. The marks that tools can read, and where they fall short, are covered in how to tell if images on a website are AI-generated.

A blocklist for any engine

The Huge AI Blocklist is a community-maintained list of more than 1,000 sites that publish AI-generated images, built to clean image search on Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing. In uBlock Origin, open the dashboard, choose Filter lists, expand Import, paste the list's list.txt address and apply. uBlock Origin then refreshes it daily. There is a uBlacklist version too, and the README covers Safari on iOS and Firefox on Android.

Two cautions from its README. A separate "nuclear" list covers sites that mix real and generated images, such as art and stock-photo sites, so enabling it may hide legitimate pictures. And engine coverage differs, so check the README for the engine you use. DuckDuckGo names this list as an example of what its filter relies on, so subscribing likely adds little there and the most on engines with no filter of their own. For text results, see Slop Evader alternatives, or the roundup of best tools to filter AI-generated content from search.

Where Kitsuvo fits

We make Kitsuvo, and it is not an image-search filter. Its Hide identifiable AI images, video and audio setting hides media that a page itself labels as AI-generated, that comes from a known image generator, or whose filename names one. An optional local vision model, which you install yourself through Ollama, can add estimates for a small number of images per page. It works on the pages you open, not as a dedicated pass over image-search thumbnails, and unlabelled media can pass. For an image-search page, use the engine's filter or a blocklist, and use Kitsuvo for the sites you then open.