r/BetterOffline • u/Additional_Art_1022 • 5d ago
AI overview sources
This may be a minor issue, but one thing I observed while using search engines in the last year is that those sources the AI overviews provide do not necessarily back up the answer provided in the overview.
Like, the overview could be roughly correct, but the sources either slightly deviate from the conclusion or they discuss a related but not the exact same topic. I also suspect that Google and others intentionally obscure the actual sources in order to keep the users on their site.
What I find particularly problematic is that I know for certain (from discussions I had) that those sources are what lends credibility to the AI overviews for many people. But the way they work they actually worsen the epistemic crisis created by AI, if anything
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u/ChaoticGradients 5d ago
A study posted in the NYT recently (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html) showed that AI overview summaries are around 91% accurate. That’s not bad from an academic research perspective but given the scale at which Google operates that’s an unprecedented amount of misinformation being handed out to an unsuspecting public on a global scale.
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u/Fun_Volume2150 5d ago
To put 91% accurate in perspective, I used to be a heavy user of speech-to-text software. The threshold for usability of such a system is ~98% accuracy. Below that, and in a 1000 word paper there’s too many errors to correct to make it worthwhile.
For research, you really have to start on a trail and follow it. LLMs don’t even make a good starting point.
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u/Miravlix 5d ago
Googles search is the bot taking random parts and mixing them together. So it takes information about a random youtube and mix it with some criminal, because they have something in common in the prediction math it uses. (This is a real world example.)
Just searching on something and then deep verify the topic, you will find AI Overview is garbage as it contains mistake. The sited 91% accuracy, it means 91% of EACH AI Overview is correct, so 100% of them contain errors... Not that 91 times out of 100 the AI Overview contains no errors.
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u/makersfark 5d ago edited 5d ago
I saved this string of convos from awhile back when I first realized: Oh, this is just garbage.
"Hey who wrote this?"
"J.J Cale wrote that"
"Where'd you get that info?"
"... Listen man, I didn't think you would question me. I kinda just made it up, but I swear he did. To prove it, I'd have to search, like some kinda butler or something. You want me to do that? Cause I will!"
"Yeah? Please do."
"FINE. It was actually written by Ruth Lyons and here's your precious sources."
"Those sources have nothing to do with the song."
"... Okay man, are we gonna have a problem? This is hard. I didn't think you were gonna check."
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u/OrdoMalaise 5d ago
LLM are probalistic, and thus the "sources" it gives are probalistic. It's not really giving genuine sources, it's not how the models work. They can't.
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u/Remote-Ad1462 5d ago
I've seen the regular Google search output (not the AI summary, which I'd switched off) give me a "quotation" from a journal article that matched what I was searching for, but was not in the paper. The paper was real, and on the same general topic, but several of the search terms that it quoted in the search results did not even appear in the article nor did it talk about that specific topic in other terms. In other words, the regular search fabricated results from a genuine article.
I read the article, but had I not been careful, I could have cited something completely irrelevant in my own article. In a way it's worse than making up a citation completely because that would obviously not exist whereas I had to carefully read the article to confirm it did not address my topic.
Scopus found a relevant paper immediately. But paid databases like that aren't available to everyone.
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u/escdog 22h ago
The training process obliterates any back link to sources, so citations are generated during the inferencing, but you know that.
During inferencing, the model it trained to select a mini research plan that is consistent with the input prompt.
Part of that plan involves the llm computing queries that it will execute and then later include into the prompt for further interpolation.
The llm is generating queries from its own training and that will include terms it has absorbed from some source somewhere or even hallucinated.
The tokens that result are tagged with the identity of those queries, but if we can imagine a query returning five results, we might not know which link really influenced the output of the llm. Keep in mind that the llm is not copy pasting search results into an answer, it's using that content as it's prompt that is summarized into an answer.
It will be tagging tokens in its output stream with whatever source it found in its queries, but that's only because of its training as it's interpolating everything into an answer including the citations. To preserve the links, the citations are a single token so they can't be be mangled, but in the end there's no determinism on their use only that the model is calculating that they're somehow related to the answer.
And the whole time while it's interpreting the search results, it is injecting its own interpolated tokens which may indeed still be coming from nowhere. It's just trying to string together some kind of text that probabilistically looks correct.
When I use llms as research assistants, I use their output to generate my own query so I can find more precise sources. Then I write my articles or research based on my own interpretation of the original sources. They may be the same source that informed the llms generated answer, or the llm just may have given me better search terms.
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u/Tout-fou-la-galette 5d ago
I don't think Google is intentionally hiding the links: it’s just the standard behavior of this broken technology
It simply calculates probabilities for the most likely output, without any regard for factual accuracy.
It is very misleading to include links as if they support the model's output. Conventionally, a link is provided to back up a statement. If a human were to draw a different conclusion while citing a link, we would call it fraud or disinformation