AI Overviews Misinformation Damages Small Businesses

Damian Mansell was paying Google about £700 a month to advertise his online building-plastics supplier, The Plastics Shed. Then he searched for his own company and saw what Google's AI Overview said: customer feedback was "overwhelmingly negative," with complaints about delayed deliveries, lying staff, and damaged products. The reviews weren't about his company. They appeared to belong to competitors and sellers of actual plastic sheds. Mansell had no direct way to fix it.

"I can see how that happens, but why should it happen with Google?" Mansell said. He spent weeks submitting feedback through Google's "thumbs down" mechanism. After a couple of weeks, the summary improved. He still wonders how much business the error cost him. Google refused to refund his ad spend.

Betty Whitney, who runs NW Select Property Management in Idaho, saw Google's overview merge her firm with a similarly named company that closed years ago, mixing in 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. She spent months tweaking her website and using feedback tools. The overview got better, but it still reverts to the wrong version periodically.

Philippa Main, a real estate agent in Northern Virginia, cannot convince Google she left Florida three years ago. Her name search shows a line stating she has been "servicing the Tampa Bay area since 2014," right above her Virginia address. She combed the internet to find where the AI drew from, emailed Google, and asked friends to report the issue. Nothing stuck. "Google just doesn't seem to care," she said.

Google's AI Overviews synthesize information from company websites, Reddit posts, old blogs, and Yelp reviews into a single digest. When those summaries are inaccurate, business owners say they lose customers and revenue. Lily Ray, an SEO and AI search consultant, called it the "biggest change to search" in her 16-year career. Businesses now have to manage the AI's interpretation of their reputation, not just ranking for clicks.

Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, said traditional search let users see multiple results and counterbalance errors. With AI Overviews, users get "The Answer" – which may be wrong. Google processes over five trillion searches a year. Even if 90% of overviews are accurate, that leaves half a trillion wrong answers, as the New York Times reported in April. A Google spokesperson said that study has "serious holes."

Michael King, founder of digital marketing agency iPullRank, said businesses need to create more "surface area" – more content targeting more keywords – to help AI find the right answer. He encourages clients to position themselves as experts on their own brands. "You've got to think of it as more like a reputation management campaign than your classic SEO campaign," he said.

Ben Fisher runs Steady Demand, an SEO and social media consultancy. He saw Google's summary warn that his company was a scam. The warning came from an old Reddit thread about a similarly named app. He spent time "training" Google to know the difference. "The big problem is there's nobody to contact," he said. "You search once, and you're done."

Legal recourse is uneven. A musician in Canada filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against Google after its AI summary falsely identified him as a sex offender. A German court made a preliminary ruling that Google is liable for false statements in its AI Overviews. A Google spokesperson said the German case focuses on "specific and narrow errors" and that the company plans to appeal. Shah said the U.S. has "very little consumer protection" for these issues.

Mansell still advertises with Google. Without it, people don't click through to his site. "I just gave up," he said. "It was just an absolute pointless exercise."