Google is throwing up AI-generated search results less frequently now since the past few weeks, a study has found. The numbers collected by an SEO company called BrightEdge showed that AI Overviews fell in search by 11 percent on June 1 to 7 percent on June 30. There was also a big drop in citations from Reddit and Quora in search.
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The AI Overviews feature which was launched earlier in May gained notoriety after showing up strange results like recommending glue on pizza and eating rocks, after picking up jokes from Reddit and the satirical news website, The Onion.
Google then made changes saying it was limiting the usage of user-generated content in AI Overviews and adding guardrails to detect illogical queries that shouldn’t have AI Overviews.
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A Google spokesperson has responded to the study telling The Verge that the methodology used was flawed and did not reflect their own internal findings. The study did not differentiate between users who had opted for the ‘AI Overviews & More’ feature and those who hadn’t.
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They added that AI Overviews only appears for users who have chosen Google’s experimental Search Labs feature and won’t show up for others. Meanwhile, BrightEdge stated that they had been tracking users who had opted for AI Overviews only.
Google’s launch of AI Overviews was an effort to compete with AI-powered chatbots and search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
It appears that the Sundar Pichai-led company has no plans to halt the feature yet. The spokesperson added that AI Overviews did provide more value and they will continue to finetune them to include better results.