Google search AI Mode era opens. What could go wrong?
Welcome to Google AI Mode! Everything is fine.
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| Credit: CAMILLE COHEN/AFP via Getty Images |
If the AI lovefest of Google I/O 2025 were a TV show, you might be tempted to call it It's Always Sunny in Mountain View. (It's not, by the way, especially in the fog-filled month of May, even if the company's confidence in booking an outdoor amphitheater suggests otherwise).
But here's a better sitcom analogy for the event that added AI Mode to all U.S. search results, whether we want it or not. It's The Good Place, in which our late heroes are repeatedly assured that they've gone to a better world. A place where everything is fine, all is as it seems, and search quality just keeps getting better.
Don't worry about ever-present and increasing AI hallucinations here in the Good Place, where the word "hallucination" isn't even used. Forget about the one live demo (among a dozen prerecorded ones) that went spectacularly wrong, where two presenters failed to translate each others' words via their Google AI glasses. Responsible AI, the focus of Google I/O 2023, went unmentioned.
Skyrocketing AI data center usage contributing to global warming? In
the Good Place, Google AI is fighting global warming by helping to pinpoint wildfires. Don't think too hard about that one.
And as for that whole Hollywood strike that lasted nearly a year, largely over creatives' concerns about studios using AI? Fuggedaboutit. Creative folk love AI in the Good Place — just listen to the testimonials from the filmmakers and musicians Google has cherry-picked!
Is Google search the Bad Place?
Meanwhile, SEO experts warn, search results continue to get worse with AI Mode-style overviews. According to internal memos obtained in the ongoing Department of Justice lawsuit, which the DOJ just won, Google has a perverse incentive to make them that way.
"If users don't get what they want the first time, they have to search again," says Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy at Amsive, and the author of a recent viral LinkedIn post, Google AI Overviews Have a Major Spam Problem. "So if you're serving them multiple AI overviews because they have to search multiple times, Google can then say 'we have more people using AI every day.' It's like, 'yeah, but there's no way to turn it off.'"
Or to put it in the plot-pivoting words of The Good Place's Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell): "Wait a minute. This is the Bad Place!"
Google has a roughly 90 percent share of the search market, after all; it can afford to make the product worse by using AI so long as investors keep juicing the stocks of AI-heavy companies. It can pretend to look like the Good Place for search, while under the hood it's anything but.
Like Eleanor Shellstrop, however, users know what's up. Google search results have "kind of become the laughingstock of the Internet," Ray says. "Whenever Google communicates about AI Overviews, they say 'our users really love it.' But then when you read Google Forum, it's always like 'how do I turn this thing off, I want Google search back.'" (Even turning AI search off, according to one Google Forum user, doesn't turn it off.)
As in The Good Place, this awareness may not do a lick of good. If investors continue to reward Google for frothy presentations filled with cool-sounding AI features, there's no incentive for quality control. As often appears to be the case in 2025, we have to get used to living in separate realities.
So users may breathe a little easier knowing that Google stock fell by 1.5 percent in the aftermath of I/O (and is down 12 percent in 2025 as a whole). Is that enough to nudge the company to pay attention?
It would take Google I/O levels of Pollyanna optimism to think so. Instead, let's draw our attention to a Good Place fact you won't find easily in AI Mode. It took demon Michael (Ted Danson) 300 years to stop resetting Eleanor's memories every time she realized she was in the Bad Place.
So, only a few hundred years to go before Google is working for us again. Everything is fine.
Thank you for this article. Google betrayed us. Google betrayed the internet. Google betrayed america.
ReplyDeleteAll b******* I still is very primitive it makes so many mistakes. Instead of improving technology the tea drinker must focus on improving himself. each human being should do that.
ReplyDeleteChildish laughable grown ups playing with toys 🧸
Dirty drinker master gro up and stop playing with toys 🧸
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ReplyDeleteThey provide excellent services!!
Nice.
ReplyDelete10 years on, still happy i ''quit google''.
ReplyDeletesooooo many better choices out there.
What's the environmental cost of turning every search into an AI quest? How much will asking for a list of pasta recipes or Sean Connery films speed up the frying of our planet?
ReplyDeleteMy research resposibilites require that I cite science-based resources. I suppose that Google add-ons will give me more weird and irrelevant/incorrect stuff to ignore. I would love to know how to turn this "feature" off.
ReplyDeleteI just want to turn the dammm thing off. The results are almost always inaccurate having gleaned from inaccurate info. I was hoping this article was going to announce Google giving us that option - toggle it off. Nah - just "new and improved" artificial stupidity. I'm starting to make the move to Brave - where I can choose to live without the aggravation.
ReplyDeleteAmen. Don't know what that =s in the new wapo rating schema
DeleteDid Google AI number your bullet points?
ReplyDelete;)
came here to ask the same question
DeleteYour ad for Tiny Jewel Box looked like it might have been AI generated. The woman looks like she has two left arms. It is hard to tell for sure but the video shows her with an all white dress . The still shows a nearly flesh colored something inside her left arm.
ReplyDeleteI've already changed my default search. I hate AI results.
ReplyDeleteOh, Google, what have you done?!
ReplyDeleteGreat, let dive deeper into a product that gives contradictory answers and down right false info from conspiracy theories.
ReplyDeleteAs Google stated to use rules based AI decades ago, your shorthand probably means “deep learning” AI based on some database.
ReplyDeleteMoi, Google is demonstrably better than what,4 or 6 well funded competing search offerings.
It ani’t broke.
One can always use a different search engine. I haven’t used google in years.
ReplyDeleteIt failed to mention the restaurant had permanently closed? Well, you didn’t ask if it was open. You asked what to order! So, basically an answer a statistical Sheldon would give you. With such assistance you need to know what you don’t know and how to ask questions. Summing up, you still need to rely on your own intelligence. AIis a blunt tool devoid of any cultural, social, emotional, ethical considerations. Its answers are just informations put together. It is not knowledge and it is not truth. For those things you have to search again, among people.
ReplyDeleteLife hack: if you include a curse word in your search, Google won't give you the AI blurb. Plus... it's cathartic.
ReplyDeleteWhat to watch for are incorrect answers, incorrect grammar, answer non responsive to question, government spying on people that meet the standards of the algorithm to identify "trump's enemies", etc. I shut it off.
ReplyDeleteCan we get a "Google Classic" option without AI? If not, I'm going to spend much more time with Duck Duck Go. Is there any non-Google image search out there?
ReplyDeleteBing has an image search.
Delete86 47
Does this mean the AI summary will be on a different page and we can finally turn it off? 🤞
ReplyDeleteA simple search for API's Algae Fix yields propaganda straight from the manufacturer. Death of fish = user error. While I believe some of that is true — there are too many stories on Amazon and Reddit that claim otherwise.
ReplyDeleteThe instructions call for 1ml for every 10 gallons. Using a syringe, I was able to extract the exact amount to inject into my 20-gallon tank. Still, half my fish were dead the next morning. My Ph, nitrate, and nitrite levels were stellar. There was no user error.
Beware of the manipulative horse manure coming out of the AI search results because you'll see more exactly like that to lay the blame on the consumer and not the manufacturer as they continue to peddle their poison.
I'm not saying all AI is bad, but humans are the point of entry where it gains its knowledge.
I still use Google occasionally, but 98% of the time I've used Perplexity since last December.
ReplyDeleteCertainly not 100% accuracy, but higher than most other AI models (generally around 93%).
The models will improve quickly over the next year or two...and at least for me, I prefer concise results to the old-school long list of URL's.
Even though Google contests it, Apple announced last week that Google searches on their Safari browser declined for the first time ever.
This article comes after I wasted time trying to find a way to get rid of the AI summaries on Google. Everyone knows that he AI generated information is often wrong. Elon's Grok was too honest, and so it's been ordered to sway information and tone towards Elon's opinion (it was Grok who spilled the beans on this). Not only can AI not be trusted, but the summaries, which take precedence, are slowing my searches and make the search page bounce around, as AI creates and edits it's response.
ReplyDeleteThere is a way to do this, at least until Google fixes it: Add the word fracking to the end of your search. But instead of fracking, use the obvious obscenity that shares a lot of its letters. (Trying to get this comments to pass the guidelines.)
DeleteI have no interest in any AI searches and ignore the summaries. I now use DuckDuckGo and have completely abandoned Google Search. I also use Firefox and not Chrome.
ReplyDeleteIs there a non-AI search option? Or an opt out feature?
ReplyDeleteI only want to use AI when I when I want to use AI, which is rarely.
Don’t want Bing, don’t use Copilot and don’t want Gemini or any AI bot either. We need a non AI search engine.
ReplyDeleteI don't like that you can't completely eliminate COPILOT from new PCs. I don't want it.
DeleteI'm always amazed how quickly a noun, such as Google (company), morphs into a verb, "Googling". In English grammar, this change is called a 'gerund', (but that is pretty nerdy). Another example is how gift, a noun, morphed into 'gifting' a gerund functioning as a verb. We are watching English change before our eyes. It's fun and amazing if you have an open mind for it.
ReplyDeleteUgh. More ens****tifaction. Great.
ReplyDeleteThey need something to make the shareholders feel as if things are 'moving'. No matter if it's moving towards the bottom of the barrel.
DeleteHere is another option - stop using Google.
ReplyDeleteU Got That
DeleteI already quit Bing. Now same for Google. Boo in them Both!
I already have. I use DuckDuckGo with Firefox.
DeleteI use Qwant. Google has been useless for years and has gotten worse with AI.
ReplyDeleteQwant still has AI. Hopefully it won’t be as bad.
DeleteI've been using Gemini for several months. I agree with "Watch out for: AI answers that are wrong or overly confident" From time to time, and more often than I anticipated the results seem lacking, so I comment on the results and ask why a particular company, person or highly relevant point was excluded in Gemini’s response. It then tells me: You are absolutely right…” and proceeds to fill in the gaps from the previous output. And then I check for the same using Perplexity and Claude. So much for saving time!
ReplyDeleteWho uses Google anymore and why?
ReplyDeleteI use Google almost every day. I am one of the early adoptors - I was invited to test drive Google when they only had five employees. That was when our web browsers were Netscape, if you go that far back. Googles not a perfect product, but what is? Only Jesus was perfect and look what they did to him!
Delete... and there it is.
Deletein a nutshell
Just give me a basic search that does what I tell it to do and clearly identify which results are advertisements. Flush the rest.
ReplyDeleteExactly. The strength of google was it's simplicity.
DeleteIt's like appliances all forced to be 'smart' while a simple on & off button + 3 or 4 settings (for instance washing cycle) will do. Not everything has to be controlled by my phone.
They ruin everything, making everything more complicated than it should be. the result is everyone moving on to a different brand/product. Some of the huge names in tech & brands between 1990-2015 don't even exist anymore. Why? because of the above.
Google will make itself obsolete when they could have been THE search engine for any foreseeable long-term future.
Ahhh yes I can't wait to receive answers from a schizophrenic inference machine, which exists solely in order to be trained...so that one of its descendants can take my job. The fact that AI can search the internet and answer questions is incidental, its real purpose is to relieve you of your job, intellectual independence, and any sense of agency, so that CEO's and shareholders can make more money.
ReplyDeleteThis feels like that moment in The Good Place when you realize you’ve been tricked into thinking things are great but it’s all a façade.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I was cool with AI summaries… until it tried to explain quantum physics with emojis.
ReplyDeleteSo now instead of getting 10 blue links, I get one confident hallucination. Thanks, Google.
ReplyDeleteExactly! It's like Clippy grew up and started lying with flair.
DeleteImagine being gaslit by your search engine. Love this new dystopian update!
ReplyDeleteGoogle AI Mode: where your questions are answered with 90% confidence and 10% vibes.
ReplyDeleteLol, it’s like getting advice from your overly confident friend who’s mostly right… until he’s really not
DeleteI miss when I could Google something and just… read a blog post. Now I get AI poetry.
ReplyDeleteThe Bad Place? Nah, just Silicon Valley pretending it knows what people want.
ReplyDeleteI asked for a lasagna recipe, it gave me a philosophical debate about tomatoes. AI Mode is WILD.
ReplyDeleteWait, same! It quoted Plato and still didn’t tell me how long to bake it.
DeleteThis is what happens when tech bros watch too much Black Mirror.
ReplyDelete"Welcome to Google AI Mode! Everything is fine." - AI and Everything is fine in the same phrase, joking right?
ReplyDelete