Google removes AI Overviews for certain medical queries

Following an investigation by the Guardian that found Google AI Overviews offering misleading information in response to certain health-related queries, the company appears to have removed the AI Overviews for some of those queries.

For example, the Guardian initially reported that when users asked “what is the normal range for liver blood tests,” they would be presented with numbers that did not account for factors such as nationality, sex, ethnicity, or age, potentially leading them to think their results were healthy when they were not.

Now, the Guardian says AI Overviews have been removed from the results for “what is the normal range for liver blood tests” and “what is the normal range for liver function tests.” However, it found that variations on those queries, such as “lft reference range” or “lft test reference range,” could still lead to AI-generated summaries.

When I tried those queries this morning — several hours after the Guardian published its story — none of them resulted in seeing AI Overviews, though Google still gave me the option to ask the same query in AI Mode. In several cases, the top result was actually the Guardian article about the removal.

A Google spokesperson told the Guardian that the company does not “comment on individual removals within Search,” but that it works to “make broad improvements.” The spokesperson also said that an internal team of clinicians reviewed the queries highlighted by the Guardian and found “in many instances, the information was not inaccurate and was also supported by high quality websites.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Google for additional comment. Last year, the company announced new features aimed at improving Google Search for healthcare use cases, including improved overviews and health-focused AI models.

Vanessa Hebditch, the director of communications and policy at the British Liver Trust, told the Guardian that the removal is “excellent news,” but added, “Our bigger concern with all this is that it is nit-picking a single search result and Google can just shut off the AI Overviews for that but it’s not tackling the bigger issue of AI Overviews for health.”