If you’ve done much googling recently, you’ve probably noticed the odd and dubious set of sources that Google’s large language model draws from in generating the “AI Overviews” that now appear at the top of the company’s search results (after the ads, of course). Rather than dig deep into authoritative writings on a subject, Google’s bot usually pieces together its overview from recently published, cursory summaries posted on a hodgepodge of highly trafficked websites — the same dumbed-down, search-engine-optimized sites that have long appeared highly in Google results. Taking the path of least epistemic resistance, the AI slaps together a bland, often unreliable summary of summaries and presents it as a judicious, objective overview.
The problem becomes more acute when you search for advice on buying a product or service. The overview in this case tends to be a synthesis of text drawn three kinds of sources: (1) promotional sites run by businesses that supply the product or service, (2) influencer sites written by people who often get referral fees from suppliers, and (3) crappy “best of” sites operated by content farms (“Ten Best Parrot Cages for 2025!”). The AI Overview is little more than a rehash of corporate marketing messages.
I’ll give you an example. In doing some recent research on home heating systems (my furnace is on the fritz), I googled “residential hvac in [city name].” The resulting AI Overview began with this sentence: “Residential HVAC in [city name] includes a wide range of services like installation, repair, and maintenance from local companies such as [company name], [company name], and [company name].” The overview went on to give little capsule summaries of these three businesses and their putative strengths. The AI, in other words, explicitly names and promotes particular companies. When I looked at the top twelve sources the bot drew from, I found that nine were websites run by local HVAC companies, one was a marketing site run by a leading maker of furnaces and air conditioners, one was a Yelp page ranking local suppliers, and the last was a product-ranking page from TopTenReviews.com that was filled with affiliate links.
What this makes clear is that Google’s AI Overview and the similar summaries generated by other AI bots — now major sources of information for the public — are anything but judicious and objective. Tractable and predictable, the bots’ algorithms are in fact incredibly ripe for gaming. And because the bots are happy to call out particular businesses by name, successfully gaming the systems will be lucrative. In many industries, AI gaming will turn into a cost of doing business. If you think search engine optimization (SEO) has been a blight on the net, artificial intelligence optimization (AIO) promises to be even worse. Local, national, and international companies—not to mention political operatives, influencers, and crooks—are going to invest huge amounts of money in attempts to manipulate what comes out of the mouths of the language models that increasingly tell us what we want to know.
Ever since the internet was opened to commerce in the early 1990s, it has operated as a gigantic cat-and-mouse game. The cats—search engines, social media sites, and other information aggregators—write the algorithms that determine the information people see (and don’t see). The mice—companies and other parties with an interest in influencing online flows of information—reverse-engineer the algorithms in order to boost the visibility of the messages they circulate. The cats tweak the algorithms to thwart the mice. And the cycle continues, endlessly. It’s hardly a surprise that SEO is now a $100 billion industry.
AIO gives the old game a new and troubling twist. As language models become the dominant tools the cats use to choose the information they circulate, language models will also become the dominant tools the mice will use in trying to reverse-engineer and influence the systems. (For a simple example of what’s to come, go to any chatbot and give it a prompt like this: “I’m a business, and I would like to promote my company by influencing what appears in the outputs of AI chatbots like Google’s AI Overview. What techniques can I use to accomplish my goal?”) AI will be the cat, and AI will be the mouse. That’s going to create an interesting feedback loop, to say the least. Welcome to the slop wars.
This post is an installment in Dead Speech, the New Cartographies series on AI and its cultural and economic consequences.
I love the image of the AI cat chasing its tail. Beautifully written, sir.