AI Overviews

For many searches, Google now answers before you click anything. A model reads pages from the results and writes a summary, with links to some of the sources.

It changes how people search. In a Pew study of real browsing, people clicked on a search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one, and they clicked a source inside the summary only 1% of the time. Most people take the overview's word for it.

That's fine for simple facts, but overviews can go wrong in odd ways. Early on, Google's overviews suggested glue to keep cheese on pizza, taking a sarcastic forum post at its word. When the answer matters, the links are the point: open one and check it says what the summary claims.