Why you should scroll past Google AI Overview results
Google AI Overviews are leading the AI revolution – despite being damaging and often inaccurate
Search engines have been central to our lives for so long that it’s easy to forget there was a world before them.
As recently as the early Noughties, some search engines featured paid listings rather than results calibrated according to relevance.
Yet today, the ten blue links familiar to search engine users are under threat from a pernicious new arrival.
Handling over 93 per cent of UK web searches, Google is leading the charge away from directing traffic through to third-party websites.
Instead, it uses proprietary algorithms to answer search queries within the Google ecosystem.
These Google AI Overviews have become ubiquitous above blue links, and they hold obvious appeal for people in a hurry.
However, there are several drawbacks to relying on generative AI content to answer queries…
Mind your language
Platforms like Google AI Overviews are powered by large language models, or LLMs.
These text-focused AI tools seek to identify patterns in data to deliver appropriate outcomes.
If you ask Google how to hang a picture, instead of offering links to websites with the answer, its LLM will already have scanned and interpreted the content of those sites.
It will then calculate a likely outcome and display it on-screen as an answer to your query.
When asked “how do I hang a picture”, Google’s AI Overview recommended deciding on optimal placement, determining the appropriate hanging hardware and then attaching it to the wall.
None of this is any more original than the blue links to third-party websites which may still appear on-screen (though click-throughs to these resources halve when an AI overview is also present).
LLMs are simply regurgitating existing content, typically taken from the same websites their web crawler algorithms used to rate as the most highly regarded information sources.
Most of the surface web – any online resource you can view through a web browser like Chrome or Edge – has now been plundered by LLMs.
They have paid no fees for this appropriation of content. They make no concessions to copyright. Nor do they even acknowledge which sites content has been taken from.
However, as your search strings become more precise (such as quoting text), it becomes increasingly obvious which specific sites AI scraper tools have harvested content from.
The death of the World Wide Web?
Search engines are gatekeepers to the surface web, and AI-powered attempts to prevent people moving onto third-party content represent an existential threat.
As an example, research suggests almost 70 per cent of news searches through AI-powered Google results no longer lead to people clicking a link.
Every website incurs costs just to remain online, while content generation (text, photography or anything else) also usually requires payment for services rendered.
By plagiarising website content without driving traffic to those sites, search engines are strangling the economic life out of many resources we’ve grown accustomed to accessing.
No traffic means no advertising, which means no revenue unless websites impose a paywall. Even then, without search engines directing traffic to them, how would new audiences find them?
Many of these sites are reputable outlets with content produced by experienced professionals, who take pride in producing accurate and helpful output.
AI engines have no quality control qualms, and there is extensive evidence that a large percentage of AI overviews are limited, biased or simply inaccurate.
Alarmingly, LLMs are now running out of accessible source material, which in some cases is driving them to include their own output in results.
This creates a doom loop of inaccuracy, where the quality of AI overviews dwindles as the websites offering correct answers are made economically unviable by the sudden lack of traffic.
It’s difficult to turn off Google AI overviews, especially on a smartphone, but avoiding AI mode and choosing to view only Web results is highly advisable.
Above all, keep visiting the websites, social media channels and online resources who still appear in internet search results.
The less you rely on AI overviews, the less justification it gives their owners to expand their rollout, and there’s less chance of the web suffering a catastrophic loss of third-party content.
Finally, remember that other search engines are available…
