An analysis commissioned by the New York Times and conducted by AI startup Oumi found that Google's AI Overviews answered questions correctly 91% of the time after upgrading to Gemini 3, up from 85% with Gemini 2, but more than half of those accurate responses were ungrounded, meaning the linked sources did not fully support the information provided. Across 5,380 sources cited during the analysis, Facebook and Reddit ranked as the second- and fourth-most-cited sources, and researchers found that AI Overviews can be manipulated by self-published blog posts, with one BBC podcast host getting Google to cite a fabricated hot dog eating competition as fact a day after publishing it. With Google processing more than five trillion searches annually, a 9% error rate translates to tens of millions of incorrect answers every hour, though Google disputed Oumi's methodology, saying the benchmark test used contained incorrect information and did not reflect real search behavior.
