RIP web search and say hello to slop search.

A new research published by the Pew Research Center analysing the current trends of internet browsing activity found that Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not encounter an AI summary. And this is a serious concern.

On their official blog post, Google announced over a year ago that they expanded AI Overviews, with more planning and research capabilities, and “AI-organized” search results.

But I would like you to note the following statement from Google’s blog post, which I see it as a promise to users:

“We’ve meticulously honed our core information quality systems to help you find the best of what’s on the web. And we’ve built a knowledge base of billions of facts about people, places and things — all so you can get information you can trust in the blink of an eye.”

However, Pew Research Center’s published data this spring analysed a sample of 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share their online browsing activity and found that Google users were less likely to click on result links when visiting search pages with an AI summary compared with those without one.

Furthermore, searches that resulted in an AI-generated summary, users very rarely clicked on the sources cited. In other words, this is no longer a search for information, but a consumption of AI-generated content with no questions asked.

The researchers also found that, overall, around one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary. Some 18% of all the Google searches in the study generated an AI summary as part of the search results, and the vast majority of these summaries (88%) cited three or more sources. Only 1% cited a single source. This might have been acceptable, only the study also found that the most frequently cited sources in both Google AI summaries and standard search results are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit!

The researchers highlighted that these three sites collectively accounted for 15% of the sources that were listed in the AI summaries, and they made up a similar share (17%) of the sources listed in standard search results. Thus, suggesting that in many cases, these citations are not the actual sources of the information included in Google AI-generated search results. Think of it as “second-hand” information posted by a bunch of users, who may or may not be the actual authors of the cited content.

Not to mention, of course, the serious hallucination problem that plagues all of the current generative AI models, including Google’s AI Overview. I posted on LinkedIn a month ago about how Google’s AI hallucinated that Airbus, not Boeing, was involved in the tragic Air India crash. And this is just one example out of many. Do you remember their Pizza with Glue recipe?

I asked on my LinkedIn post at the time: How can this situation be a good thing for Google? And I think this question is even more prominent in light of Pew Research Center’s new study. Is this really a web search anymore?

I wrote about how the term “Brain rot” was named Oxford Word of the Year 2024, which is defined as the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, as a result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Considering what we are witnessing in modern politics and business is becoming more driven by grift and misinformation. Having a search engine that offers Wikipedia and Reddit as two of its key “citations”, topped up with hallucinated and made-up nonsense peddled by the AI models as a trustworthy answer to questions, we will witness an unprecedented level of brainrot, which I cannot fathom.

This is 2014 all over again for me, when we warned at the time about the dangers of outsourcing editorial management to AI recommendation systems in social media platforms, and it was dismissed. Now here we are again. Only this time — as AI is an amplifier, not a replacement — what we have witnessed with social media will dwarf what is coming in the coming months and years.

When 2025 arrived, what did I warn you about? 2025 will be the era of Internet of Sh*t (IoS): https://retortmedia.com/podcast/solo/2025/01/15/why-2025-is-the-era-of-internet-of-sht-ios/