> It messes up sometimes

i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.

I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.

When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.

I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.

I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.

Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.

My problem with the AI Overview feature is that it provides what you're looking for at the expense of everyone who provided the data to make that functionality possible.

Website owners losing traffic to the AI Overview feature is well-documented and has been discussed extensively here. This reality begets a few questions:

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What happens when it no longer becomes profitable for anyone to share knowledge online?

AI companies have scraped physical books to build their training sets. What happens when it no longer becomes profitable for anyone to share knowledge at all?

Are you okay with a handful of corporations owning the truth?

Are you okay with that same handful telling you _what the truth is?_

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I'm totally fine with Google telling me where to find truth. I am, personally, NOT okay with for-profit corporations like them telling me what the truth is. Every AI search I do is tacit acceptance of what they're doing, so I try not to use it.

All that said, you're definitely not in the minority outside of this site.

Heaps of people take the AI Overview result as the truth, case closed.

Given its inaccuracies (I used it the other day as a last result to locate these Korean cat treats, and AI Overview said that it was a "health food" for "wellness"), it's a massive problem that we haven't fully realized yet IMO.

Enjoy it while you can. Google spent years perfecting the art of steering users away from what they searched for and toward advertiser sites, all while pretending to be a search engine. There's no way showing users the exact answer right beneath their search query is profitable in any meaningful sense. And so, it will end.

Genuinely, I’d recommend you spend a day manually verifying every AI answer you otherwise would have just trusted. I suspect what you’ll find is actually that you cannot bring yourself to do it. I’ve found myself trusting AI answers sometimes, despite knowing they’re usually false, and after some introspection I realized my subconscious was acting on three factors: I wouldn’t actually be harmed by being wrong about the thing, I wanted to feel like I knew it, and I didn’t want to spend any time on it. Getting a real answer could only work against those goals: I didn’t actually need it, it’d likely be less certain, and it’d certainly take a lot longer. In other words, I was fooling myself.

It no longer searches for me but tells me to search for what I’m looking for, which brings it back to itself, telling me to go search for what I’m looking for…

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)

I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.

Same here , about 95% of my searches o just look at the AI overview, and that’s been enough.

I don’t like AI only idea but I think it will work just fine

The primary way that Google's AI Overview appears in my life is having to correct the misapprehensions of older family who see the immediate answer on top of their search and just uncritically accept it. Based on that, I think it must be wrong quite a lot.

> And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse

Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.

If the AI overview produces plausible sound answers, how do you know that it messes up very rarely?

If I search topics I am knowledge about, the overviews are almost always at least slightly wrong.

Not all websites are correct sources of information, but I am generally aware of which websites are trustworthy and can cross check.

I do like it - however, I find my self using google less and less every day. I lean much more toward agents as my primary search tool for work related items.

For daily things - finding restaurants, looking up my kid's symptoms, etc. - I still use Google

You are not the only one.

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites.

I disagree with “sometimes”. But anyway, the gargantuan difference is that with websites you can get a feel for their credibility. As a simple example, documentation on MDN is miles more trustworthy that your average SEO spam blog, and you can see this as soon as you enter the page. Yes, some scammers are craftier than other, but the signal is there.

With LLMs, all answers get the same weight.

And asking for sources is not reliable. They are too often made up or contradict what the page says.

> and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it.

And what will you do when most posts on the web are just junk SEO spam to trick LLMs into telling you what they want? It’s not like that’s hard to do, even.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

I hate that it confidently claims something based on a single Reddit/forum comment. This happens very often and it’s often wrong.

As a user: I love it!

As a former blogger: I hate it. But I knew years ago where things were heading and stopped. No point in blogging/ writing etc.

Sometimes? It gives completely incorrect/hallucinated information more than 50% of the time, making it nearly useless.

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)

Have you actually used it? Because sometimes is doing heavy lifting there and very rarely is flat out lying. It consistently messes up and hallucinates.

Google themselves are the primary driving reason why most websites are unreadable.

And since now they explicitly aim to never drive any human traffic to any websites, it will only become worse.

I hate it conceptually but in practice it often has what I need, and I can usually just scroll past it when I don’t

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)

Then you are extremely ignorant about the topics that you research, because I don't think I've seen a single AI overview that did not have a mistake, and I don't think I've seen less than half that got a critical fact wrong.

I like the AI Overview feature because it gets straight to the point and with no ads or cookie banners in the way, not because it’s AI.

This is the way the internet used to be before it was enshittified, you just type in some keywords and the first result was probably the most relevant and readable source of info. But now, no more.

I think if a modern search engine could deliver the same experience but with organic human written content, I’d probably use that. This is probably a new niche now for upcoming search engines, focused on finding human created works.

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This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing is so obviously everywhere online and especially on this forum.

Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.