How AI Overviews Changed Google Search and What Users Can Do

Google started showing AI Overviews, AI-written answers above the search results, to everyone in the US in May 2024, then in many more countries. Since then it has added AI Mode, a chat-style search tab. For many searches, the first thing you see is now a summary rather than a list of websites.

What changed

• Answers before links. For many questions, an AI Overview summarizes several pages at the top, with source links beside or below it.
• Fewer clicks to websites. When the summary answers the question, people often don't click through, which matters to the sites that wrote the information.
• More room for mistakes. Summaries can misread a source, mix up details or treat a joke as fact. See how AI Overviews get answers wrong.
• AI Mode. A separate tab where you can ask follow-up questions, closer to a chatbot than a results page.

Do AI Overviews still appear in Incognito?

Yes. AI Overviews aren't tied to your Google account, so they appear whether you're signed in, signed out or in Incognito. Google doesn't offer a setting to turn them off.

What you can do

• Use the Web filter. Under the search box, choose More → Web (or add &udm=14 to the results address). You get plain links, without AI Overviews.
• Make it your default. Add a custom search engine in Chrome with https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 and set it as the default. See how to search Google without AI answers.
• Hide them with an extension. Search Cleaner hides the AI Overview, the AI Mode tab and other extra sections you choose, such as People Also Ask and sponsored results, while keeping normal Google search.
• Try another search engine. DuckDuckGo lets you turn its AI answers off, and some engines don't use them at all.

Getting good answers either way

• For anything that matters, such as health, money or legal questions, open the sources instead of trusting the summary.
• Check the date of the source. Summaries can repeat outdated information.
• When an AI answer seems off, search the exact claim in quotes to see where it came from.

AI search tools are changing quickly, so expect the layout to keep shifting. For how Google compares with AI-first tools, see Perplexity vs Google.