itch.io is giving shoppers a cleaner aisle. The indie storefront has expanded its generative-AI disclosure tools so search results now include a “No AI” checkbox that hides any page carrying a genAI disclosure, Eurogamer reports.
Games that use generative AI already had to disclose that on itch, much as they do on Steam, though itch still does not ask creators to spell out how much of a project the tools touched. Ticking No AI simply filters those marked pages out of a browse or search session.
The change arrives as the site fights a surge of low-effort uploads. itch said daily game-page creation roughly doubled over the past two months even though downloads and purchases did not keep pace, and it publicly noted that it had deleted “a couple terabytes of AI slop,” citing its terms against AI spam, according to Kotaku.
That matches what other storefronts are seeing. Steam Next Fest just came through a record demo rush thick with lookalike AI projects, and developers pulled builds over cloning fears while Valve argued it would not police which tools people use.
RCG has been tracking the same wave elsewhere, from Valve saying it is “fully aware” of low-quality AI games flooding Steam Next Fest to Anthropic tightening Claude away from cloning existing titles. Filters will not stop someone from generating a game overnight, but they do give players a one-click way to keep that flood out of their recommendations.
For itch, the bet is straightforward: keep the open upload culture that made the site valuable, require disclosure, delete the worst spam, and let customers opt out of the rest. Whether that is enough depends on how fast the next wave of tools can spit out pages that still pass a checkbox. Either way, the No-AI toggle and the mass deletion are the clearest signal yet that even the most open indie storefronts are done pretending the slop wave is a rounding error.
