Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs), which now often appear at the top of organic search results, are drawing around 10 percent of their sources from documents written by … other AIs, according to a recent report.
Originality.ai, a company that makes AI detection software, recently studied 29,000 different Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Google queries, those that cover life-changing topics such as health, financial, legal, or political topics. The company then evaluated the AIOs that appeared at the top of the page, the links they cited, and the first 100 organic search results for each query.
Running the AIO citations through its AI Detection Lite 1.0.1 model, the company found that 10.4 percent of them were likely generated by an LLM. This means one AI is drawing on output from another, which could contribute to an echo chamber of recycled ideas and biases.
“Even a small proportion of AI-generated citations in high-stakes areas raises trust and reliability concerns,” Originality.ai Director of Marketing and Sales Madeleine Lambert told The Register via email. “And while AI Summaries aren’t directly used in training data, over-sampling AI-written content makes it more likely those outputs are recycled into future models. This can then become a recursive loop."