Looking for a business on Google used to mean sorting through links. Now you get one tidy AI summary, and when it's wrong, the business pays for it.
Damian Mansell set up The Plastics Shed, an online seller of building plastics, in early 2025. Google's AI told shoppers his reviews were mostly negative, listing complaints about late deliveries, dishonest employees, and damaged goods.
The complaints were actually about other companies.
The same summary said his customer-service problems were a major pattern, even though some of his real reviews were positive.
"I can see how that happens, but why should it happen with Google?" Mansell said. "I mean, obviously, the forefront of AI technology."
Chirag Shah, who teaches at the University of Washington Information School, described the difference this way. "With the traditional search engine, the user sees multiple things. So if one of them has something wrong, chances are something else would counterbalance it."
An April New York Times report said Google handles over five trillion searches a year. Even if nine times out of 10 the AI summaries are right, that leaves half a trillion wrong ones.
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Its sources include corporate websites, Reddit threads, decade-old blog posts, and Yelp reviews. It often shows links that don't back up what it wrote, so it can invent plausible falsehoods.
Betty Whitney runs NW Select Property Management in Idaho. Google's AI mixed her firm with a similarly named company that shut down years earlier and added reviews from property managers in other states.
"If I'm a customer, and I'm looking for a property management company, and I look at the AI overview, I wouldn't call me," she said.
Philippa Main works in real estate in Northern Virginia. Three years after moving from Florida, Google still says she has operated in the Tampa Bay area since 2014, right above her Virginia address.
"There's so much competition in my industry that if any single thing seems off, someone's just going to call the next person on the list," Main said.
Ben Fisher runs Steady Demand, an agency that helps small/) businesses rank in Google searches, a service known as SEO. The AI labeled his own agency a scam because of an old Reddit thread about an app with a similar name.
"The big problem is there's nobody to contact. The other big problem is you search once, and you're done," he said.
Lily Ray, an SEO consultant, calls AI Overviews the biggest change to search she has seen in 16 years. She says leaning on Reddit and YouTube comments can go wrong fast, and companies with little online presence or easily confused names are exposed.
Michael King, founder of iPullRank, said the AI runs hidden searches and feeds the results to the software that writes the answer.
The problem is compounded by the fact that Google's AI overviews are generated automatically without human review. When a business owner spots an error, there is no direct way to appeal. The only recourse is to wait for Google's algorithms to update, which can take weeks or months. In the meantime, the false information continues to appear in search results, potentially driving away customers.
A German court has temporarily ruled that Google can be held responsible for inaccurate statements in its AI overviews, a decision Google says it will appeal.
Mansell says the overview for The Plastics Shed now looks good and matches his mostly positive real reviews.
"AI gives the common man the knowledge, but it can also ruin the common man," he said.
The AI answer reads with confidence, and many users act on it without checking other sources. A fix can take weeks, as Mansell found, and the damage is often impossible to count.
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