What Can You Do When Google’s AI Overviews Make S*@% Up About Your Brand?

Got an email last night from an ecommerce client that Google was showing wrong information in AI Overviews for searches about where a customer could find their international purchase history for the brand. Google was saying you could do it by checking your account on the website, despite the fact that there is no way to do this. Here’s what it looked like:

AI Overviews hallucinating is nothing new. And the fact that Google qualifies the AIOs with “Generative AI is experimental” (as if the average searcher even knows what that means), does nothing to stop most searchers from thinking it’s correct.

So what can you do to solve this?

For long-tail queries like this I suspect AI is lot more malleable than normal SEO results. To fix hallucinating AI results, go to the source pages, find the passages on those pages and explicitly state the opposite of what the AI results are showing. In this case on each of the Source pages, the brand should write something like the following: “Members cannot see international purchase history online.”

Once the AI bots recrawl the URLs, the answer should update to the correct version.

That said, because of how LLM results work, your mileage may vary.

The real trick to this stuff going forward is how to know this bad results are out there before your customers complain about them.

Of course, you can always respond that they are #GoogEnough.