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It is using the search engine. The AI summary is run over the top 100 results for your query (or something)

The problem is they're just running a very dumb, cheap model on the results because running a smart model on every search result page would cost them infinity money.

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This is the key part I think most “normies” miss, and it drives me absolutely mad. People take the “first thing on the SERP” as absolute gospel, always have. It went from being a reputable site (Wikipedia was generally top for a long time) to being an extracted verbatim answer (probably from either Wikipedia, IMDB, etc.) to “AI Overview” - the dumbest model ever trained. And people treat its answers as ground truth. I want to tell them “Look, I know it’s rough out there on the net and a lot of the search results are spammy, barely-coherent AI slop anyway. It’s okay if you want to ask AI for an answer instead. So do that! Please ask ChatGPT or Gemini (and ask it to cite the source for its results so you can verify). It will always do better than AI Overviews will. Don’t even use Google Search at this point unless you have to, and if you do, scroll past that slop.”

Ask chatgpt or Gemini with reasoning enabled. It fixes a lot of issues.

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