Exclusive: German research into responses to health queries raises fresh questions about summaries seen by 2bn people a month
The company has said its AI summaries, which appear at the top of search results and use generative AI to answer questions from users, are “reliable” and cite reputable medical sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Mayo Clinic.
However, a study that analysed responses to more than 50,000 health queries, captured using Google searches from Berlin, found the top cited source was YouTube. The video-sharing platform is the world’s second most visited website, after Google itself, and is owned by Google.
Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimisation platform, found YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview citations. No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to that number, they said.
I’m relatively “pro ai” but Google’s search results summaries are absolute garbage
Whenever I ask a question (usually about some dumb lore thing for some nerd shit I’m watching), it almost always pulls from the top reddit results for its AI summary. Like I’ve clicked on the reddit post links and the top comments are usually whatever was in that summary to begin with.
