Don't swallow it whole Google's threat to health

Experts warn that the 'confident authority' of search giant's AI Overviews can give completely wrong medical advice that could seriously endanger users

- By Andrew Gregory

I have got the flu or Covid? Why do I wake up feeling tired? What is causing the pain in my chest? For more than two decades, typing medical questions into the world's most popular search engine has served up a list of links to websites with the answers. Google those health queries today and the response will probably be written by artificial intelligence.

Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, first set out the company's plans to enmesh Alinto its search engine at its annual conference in Mountain View, California, in May 2024. Starting that month, he said, US users would see a new feature, AI Overviews, which would provide information summaries above traditional search results. The change marked the biggest shake-up of Google's core product in a quarter of a century. By July 2025, the technology had expanded to become available in 40 languages, with 2 billion people served AI Overviews each month.

With the rapid rollout of AI Overviews, Google is racing to protect its traditional search business, which generates about $200bn a year, before upstart AI rivals can derail it. "We are leading at the frontier of AI and shipping at an incredible pace," Pichai said last July. AI Overviews in particular were "performing well", he added.

But overviews carry risks, experts say. They use generative AI to provide snapshots of information about a topic or question, adding conversational answers above the traditional search results. They can cite sources, but do not necessarily know when that source is incorrect.

Within weeks of the feature launching in the US, users encountered untruths across a range of subjects.