You’ve probably seen it. You search for something—maybe a recipe for sourdough or a technical fix for your radiator—and before you can even see a single website, there’s this giant, colorful box hogging the screen. It’s the Google AI Overview. It’s meant to be helpful. It’s meant to save you time. But for a huge chunk of the internet, Google AI is a bad feature that is fundamentally breaking how we find reliable information.
It feels like the search engine is trying to do your homework for you, but it’s a C-minus student at best.
The reality is that Google’s shift toward AI-generated summaries isn't just a minor UI tweak. It’s a seismic shift in how data is consumed. If you’re a creator, it’s stealing your traffic. If you’re a user, it’s often giving you "hallucinations" or outdated advice wrapped in a confident-sounding tone. It’s frustrating. It’s cluttered. Honestly, it’s kind of making the web feel smaller.
The Death of the Click and Why It Matters
Google used to be a librarian. Now, it’s trying to be the book.
When you search for something specific, the AI scrapes the best parts of several websites and pastes them into a summary. This is "zero-click" search on steroids. According to data from SparkToro, more than half of all Google searches already end without a click to a website. With the integration of Gemini into the search results, that number is only going to climb.
Think about the implications.
Websites—the ones that actually do the research, test the products, and write the code—rely on visits to stay alive. If the AI summarizes a complex investigative piece into three bullet points, why would you click? You wouldn't. This creates a parasitic relationship. Google needs the content to train and feed its AI, but by showing that AI to you, it starves the original creator of the revenue they need to keep making content. If the creators go bankrupt, what is the AI going to summarize next year?
It’s a snake eating its own tail.
The Hallucination Problem: When AI Gets It Dangerous
We have to talk about the "Glue Pizza" incident. It sounds like a joke, but it’s the perfect example of why Google AI is a bad feature for people looking for facts.
A while back, Google’s AI Overview famously suggested putting non-toxic glue in pizza sauce to help the cheese stick better. Where did it get that? An 11-year-old joke from a Reddit thread. The AI couldn't distinguish between a sarcastic comment on a forum and an actual culinary tip.
Then there was the suggestion to eat at least one small rock per day for minerals.
- It misses nuance.
- It fails at satire.
- It prioritizes "consensus" over "correctness."
This happens because Large Language Models (LLMs) are predictive, not factual. They are essentially high-tech autocomplete. They predict the next most likely word in a sentence based on patterns, not because they "know" that glue is inedible. When this is applied to medical advice or financial planning, the stakes go from "funny pizza meme" to "legitimate safety hazard" very quickly.
The Loss of Diverse Perspectives
Searching for "the best way to train a puppy" used to give you ten different philosophies.
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You’d have the positive reinforcement experts, the old-school trainers, and the hobbyists on forums. You could read three different articles and form your own opinion. Now, the AI gives you a homogenized "answer." It picks a middle-ground consensus that often strips away the nuance.
Expertise isn't a monolith.
Sometimes, the "consensus" is wrong. In science, medicine, and even tech, progress happens when people disagree. By positioning the AI Overview as the "definitive" answer at the top of the page, Google is subtly training us to stop looking for second opinions. It’s a cognitive shortcut that makes us lazier and less informed.
It’s Actually Slowing You Down
Google’s whole brand was speed. 0.003 seconds to find 1 billion results. Now? You wait. You wait for the little AI sparkles to dance while it "thinks." Then you have to read a paragraph of text to find the one number or name you were looking for, which used to be highlighted in a "Featured Snippet" anyway.
It’s bloat.
It’s "feature creep" at its worst. For users on mobile devices or slow connections, these AI boxes are heavy and intrusive. They push the actual useful links—the ones you know and trust—so far down the page that you have to scroll through two screens of AI fluff and sponsored ads just to get to the Wikipedia entry or the official documentation.
Why "AI-Proofing" Your Search is the New Normal
People are already fighting back. Have you noticed the "udm=14" trend?
Tech-savvy users have figured out that adding a specific string to the end of a Google URL forces the search engine to show only "Web" results—no AI, no snippets, no fluff. Just the blue links we grew up with. The fact that people are actively seeking out "hacks" to disable a flagship feature tells you everything you need to know about its utility.
The Problem with "Good Enough" Information
Most people don't need "good enough" information. They need right information.
If you're looking for the torque specs for a cylinder head on a 1998 Honda Civic, "good enough" means you snap a bolt and ruin your engine. Google AI frequently blends specs from different models because they look similar in the training data. This is where the feature fails the most: it lacks the ability to verify. It can only summarize.
Actionable Steps: How to Handle the AI Shift
Since Google isn't likely to turn this off anytime soon (they have billions invested in Gemini), you have to change how you interact with the web.
Use the "Web" Tab
Google recently added a "Web" filter. Use it. It’s usually hidden under the "More" menu or at the top of the results page. This strips out the AI and the shopping blocks, returning you to a much cleaner, more reliable list of sources.
Verify Everything with "Source-First" Searching
If you see a claim in an AI box, don't trust it. Click the little down-arrows or the source links provided within the AI block. Go to the original site. Check the date. Check the author. If the AI is citing a Reddit post from 2012, take that advice with a massive grain of salt.
Diversify Your Search Engines
If you find that Google AI is a bad feature for your specific workflow, try tools that haven't leaned as hard into generative summaries. DuckDuckGo still offers a more traditional experience. Kagi is a paid search engine that is gaining massive traction specifically because it lets you block AI-generated garbage and prioritize human-written content.
For Content Creators: Focus on "Information Gain"
If you write for the web, stop writing "What is [Topic]" articles. The AI will win that every time. Instead, write about personal experiences, original experiments, and unique opinions. Google’s AI is a mimic; it cannot mimic a unique human perspective or a brand-new discovery. That is your only moat.
The web is changing, and not necessarily for the better. We are moving from an era of "search" to an era of "answers," but if those answers are built on a foundation of stolen content and probabilistic guesses, the value of the internet drops for everyone. Keep clicking through to the actual websites. Support the people who do the work. Don't let a chatbot be your only window into the world’s information.