Google is, apparently, quietly eliminating AI Overviews from some health-related searches in the wake of a Guardian investigation which found the feature serving users potentially misleading medical advice.
The original report found that when users searched for “what is the normal range for liver blood tests”, AI Overviews, Google’s product created as part of its research partnership with Mayo Clinic, delivered generic numbers, ignoring age, sex, ethnicity and country. Such an oversimplification could falsely reassure users that their results are normal when they might not be.
Questions Where We Lack AI Overviews Now
The Guardian reported AI Overview results don't show for searches such as:
“What is the average level for liver blood tests?”
“What is a normal liver function ratio?”
“What are normal ranges for liver enzymes?”
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But when they followed up, slightly altered variations such as “lft reference range” or “lft test reference range” still were activating AI-generated summaries.
But when I tried the same queries a few hours later, none of them turned up AI Overviews. In several instances, the top search result ended up being The Guardian’s own article on its own removals. Google still provided the choice to let the question be asked in AI Mode.
Google’s Response
Google declined to comment on "individual removals within Search" but told The Guardian that it is “always working to make broad improvements to Search”.” The spokesperson added that an internal group of clinicians checked the flagged questions and “the content was often not found to be incorrect but rather had been sourced from high-quality websites.”
Google has not responded to a request for additional comment from TechCrunch.
Health Experts Remain Concerned
Vanessa Hebditch, the director of communications and policy at the British Liver Trust, said she welcomed the dropped recommendation but added that it doesn’t fix a broader problem.
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“This is great news though,” she said of the move, before cautioning that the real problem was more widespread. As she sees it, Google is “nit-picking a single search result” instead of offering a judgement about whether AI Overviews should be applied to health topics at all.
The Bigger Picture
Last year, Google also made a number of updates to help search results related to health care, including specialised AI models and better summaries. But this latest case serves to illustrate just how risky AI-generated medical information can be in the absence of nuance and individual context.
For the time being, Google’s muted rollback testifies even to the company’s own acknowledgement of the sensitivity around combining generative AI with health advice. Whether that leads to tighter restrictions on AI Overviews for medical queries remains to be seen.