Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/24/google-ai-overviews-youtube-medical-citations-study

by bookofjoe • 6 months ago

415 200 6 months ago

jeffbee5• 6 months ago

The assumption appears to be that the linked videos are less informative than "netdoktor" but that point is left unproven.

delichon• 6 months ago

I imagine that it is rare for companies to not preferentially reference content on their own sites. Does anyone know of one? The opposite would be newsworthy. If you have an expectation that Google is somehow neutral with respect to search results, I wonder how you came by it.

alex11386• 6 months ago

How do I respond to this nicely without getting my comment flagged

morserer• 6 months ago

People don't flag comments because of tone, they flag (and downvote) comments that violate the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I skimmed your comment history and a ton of your recent comments violate a number of these guidelines.

Follow them and you should be able to comment without further issue. Hope this helps.

neom• 6 months ago

Further context: https://health.youtube/ and https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12796915?hl=en and https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/27/23426353/youtube-doctors... (2022)

xnx2• 6 months ago

Sounds very misleading. Web pages come from many sources, but most video is hosted on YouTube. Those YouTube videos may still be from Mayo clinic. It's like saying most medical information comes from Apache, Nginx, or IIS.

barbazoo• 6 months ago

Google’s search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions

It matters in the context of health related queries.

Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimisation platform, found YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview citations. No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to that number, they said.
“This matters because YouTube is not a medical publisher,” the researchers wrote. “It is a general-purpose video platform. Anyone can upload content there (eg board-certified physicians, hospital channels, but also wellness influencers, life coaches, and creators with no medical training at all).”

gowld3• 6 months ago

To the Guardian's credit, at the bottom they explicitly cited the researchers walking back their own research claims.

However, the researchers cautioned that these videos represented fewer than 1% of all the YouTube links cited by AI Overviews on health.
“Most of them (24 out of 25) come from medical-related channels like hospitals, clinics and health organisations,” the researchers wrote. “On top of that, 21 of the 25 videos clearly note that the content was created by a licensed or trusted source.
“So at first glance it looks pretty reassuring. But it’s important to remember that these 25 videos are just a tiny slice (less than 1% of all YouTube links AI Overviews actually cite). With the rest of the videos, the situation could be very different.”

Oras• 6 months ago

Credit? It’s a misleading title and clickbait.

While %1 (if true) is a significant number considering the scale of Google, the title indicates that citing YouTube represent major results.

Also what’s the researcher view history on Google and YouTube? Isn’t that a factor in Google search results?

gumboshoes2• 6 months ago

Might be but aren't. They're inevitably someone I've never heard of from no recognizable organization. If they have credentials, they are invisible to me.

xnx2• 6 months ago

Definitely. The analysis is really lazy garbage. It lumps together quality information and wackos as "youtube.com".

NewsaHackO• 6 months ago

Yea, clearly this is the case. Also, as there isn't a clearly defined public-facing medical knowledge source, every institution/school/hospital system would be split from each other even further. I suspect that if one compared the aggregate of all reliable medical sources, it would be higher than youtube by a considerable margin. Also, since this search was done with German-language queries, I suspect this would reduce the chances of reputable English sources being quoted even further.

jdlyga• 6 months ago

It's tough convincing people that Google AI overviews are often very wrong. People think that if it's displayed so prominently on Google, it must be factually accurate right?

"AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more"

It's not mistakes, half the time it's completely wrong and total bullshit information. Even comparing it to other AI, if you put the same question into GPT 5.2 or Gemini, you get much more accurate answers.

alex11386• 6 months ago

It absolutely baffles me they didn't do more work or testing on this. Their (unofficial??) motto is literally Search. That's what they're known for. The fact it's trash is an unbelievably damning indictment of what they are

bethekidyouwant• 6 months ago

Testing what every possible combination of words? Did they test their search results before AI in this way?

danudey4• 6 months ago

Testing on what? It produces answers, that's all it's meant to do. Not correct answers or factual answers; just answers.

Every AI company seems to push two points:

1. (Loudly) Our AI can accelerate human learning and understanding and push humanity into a new age of enlightenment.

2. (Fine print) Our AI cannot be relied on for any learning or understanding and it's entirely up to you to figure out if what our AI has confidently told you, and is vehemently arguing is factual, is even remotely correct in any sense whatsoever.

gowld3• 6 months ago

That's because decent (but still flawed) GenAI is expensive. The AI Overview model is even cheaper than the AI Mode model, which is cheaper than the Gemini free model, which is cheaper than the Gemini Thinking model, which is cheaer than the Gemini Pro model, which is still very misleading when working on human language source content. (It's much better at math and code).

WarmWash2• 6 months ago

I have yet to see a single person in my day to day life not immediately reference AI overviews when looking something up.

AlienRobot• 6 months ago

My favorite part of the AI overview is when it says "X is Y (20 sources)" and you click on the sources and Ctrl+F "X is Y" and none of them seem verbatim what the AI is saying they said so you're left wondering if the AI just made it up completely or it paraphrased something that is actually written in one of the sources.

If only we had the technology to display verbatim the text from a webpage in another webpage.

not_good_coder• 6 months ago

The authoritative sources of medical information is debatable in general. Chatting with initial results to ask for a breakdown of sources with classified recommendations is a logical 2nd step for context.

laborcontract2• 6 months ago

Google AI overviews are often bad, yes, but why is youtube as a source necessarily a bad thing? Are these researchers doctors? A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in his field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically every day. Doctors from every field well understand that YT is a great way to share their work and discuss w/ others.

Before we get too worked up about the results, just look at the source. It's a SERP ranking aggregator (not linking to them to give them free marketing) that's analyzing only the domains, not the credibility of the content itself.

This report is a nothingburger.

ceejayoz3• 6 months ago

A close relative is a practicing surgeon and a professor in his field. He watches youtube videos of surgeries practically every day.

A professor in the field can probably go "ok this video is bullshit" a couple minutes in if it's wrong. They can identify a bad surgeon, a dangerous technique, or an edge case that may not be covered.

You and I cannot. Basically, the same problem the general public has with phishing, but even more devastating potential consequences.

raincole• 6 months ago

The same can be said for average "medical sites" the Google search gives you anyway.

laborcontract2• 6 months ago

Your comment doesn't address my point. The same criticism applies to any medium.

RobotToaster3• 6 months ago

Imagine going onto youtube and finding a video of yourself being operated on lol

mikkupikku2• 6 months ago

Don't all real/respectable medical websites basically just say "Go talk to a real doctor, dummy."?

...and then there's WebMD, "oh you've had a cough since yesterday? It's probably terminal lung cancer."

gowld3• 6 months ago

WebMD is a real doctor, I guess. It's got an MD right in the name!

abixb2• 6 months ago

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality.

A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated one. It might have had actual facts, but overall, my trust in Gemini's response to my query went DOWN after I noticed the AI generated video attached as the source.

Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.

YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory," et al.

panki27• 6 months ago

Ourobouros - The mythical snake that eats its own tail (and ingests its own excrement)

iammjm• 6 months ago

The image that comes to my mind is rather a cow farm, where cows are served the ground up remains of other cows. isnt that how many of them got the mad cows disease? ...

no_wizard4• 6 months ago

Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.

This itself seems pretty damning of these AI systems from a narrative point of view, if we take it at face value.

You can't trust AI to generate things that are sufficiently grounded in facts that you can't even use it as a reference point. Why should end users believe the narrative that these things are as capable as they're being told they are, by extension?

gpm3• 6 months ago

Using it as a reference is a high bar not a low bar.

The AI videos aren't trying to be accurate. They're put out by propaganda groups as part of a "firehose of falsehood". Not trusting an AI told to lie to you is different than not trusting an AI.

Even without that playing a game of broken telephone is a good way to get bad information though. Hence why even reasonably trustworthy AI is not a good reference.

lm28469• 6 months ago

Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source

Almost every time for me... an AI generated video, with AI voiceover, AI generated images, always with < 300 views

wormpilled• 6 months ago

Conspiracy theory: those long-tail videos are made by them, so they can send you to a "preferable content" page a video (people would rather watch a video than read, etc), which can serve ads.

delecti• 6 months ago

All of that and you're still a heavy user? Why would google change how Gemini works if you keep using it despite those issues?

zamadatix3• 6 months ago

Just wait until you get a group of nerds talking about keyboards - suddenly it'll sound like there is no such thing as a keyboard worth buying either.

I think the main problems for Google (and others) from this type of issue will be "down the road" problems, not a large and immediately apparent change in user behavior at the onset.

no_carrier• 6 months ago

Every single LLM out there suffers from this.

JumpCrisscross3• 6 months ago

Try Kagi’s Research agent if you get a chance. It seems to have been given the instruction to tunnel through to primary sources, something you can see it do on reasoning iterations, often in ways that force a modification of its working hypothesis.

storystarling• 6 months ago

I suspect Kagi is running a multi-step agentic loop there, maybe something like a LangGraph implementation that iterates on the context. That burns a lot of inference tokens and adds latency, which works for a paid subscription but probably destroys the unit economics for Google's free tier. They are likely restricted to single-pass RAG at that scale.

suriya-ganesh• 6 months ago

Google is in a much better spot to filter out all AI generated content than others.

It's not like chatgpt is not going to cite AI videos/articles.

citizenpaul3• 6 months ago

I think we hit peak AI improvement velocity sometime mid last year. The reality is all progress was made using a huge backlog of public data. There will never be 20+ years of authentic data dumped on the web again.

I've hoped against but suspected that as time goes on LLMs will become increasingly poisoned by the the well of the closed loop. I don't think most companies can resist the allure of more free data as bitter as it may taste.

Gemini has been co opted as a way to boost youtube views. It refuses to stop showing you videos no matter what you do.

Imustaskforhelp5• 6 months ago

To be honest for most things probably yea. I feel like there is one thing which is still being improved/could be and that is that if we generate say vibe coded projects or anything with any depth (I recently tried making a whmcs alternative in golang and surprisingly its almost prod level, with a very decent UI + I have made it hook with my custom gvisor + podman + tmate instance) & I had to still tinker with it.

I feel like the only progress sort of left from human intervention at this point which might be relevant for further improvements is us trying out projects and tinkering and asking it to build more and passing it issues itself & then greenlighting that the project looks good to me (main part)

Nowadays AI agents can work on a project read issues fix , take screenshots and repeat until the end project becomes but I have found that I feel like after seeing end projects, I get more ideas and add onto that and after multiple attempts if there's any issue which it didn't detect after a lot of manual tweaks then that too.

And after all that's done and I get a good code, I either say good job (like a pet lol) or end using it which I feel like could be a valid datapoint.

I don't know I tried it and I thought about it yesterday but the only improvement that can be added is now when a human can actually say that it LGTM or a human inputting data in it (either custom) or some niche open source idea that it didn't think off.

tehjoker• 6 months ago

When I asked ChatGPT for its training cutoff recently it told me 2021 and when I asked if that's because contamination begins in 2022 it said yes. I recall that it used to give a date in 2022 or even 2023.

darth_aardvark• 6 months ago

I don't think most companies can resist the allure of more free data as bitter as it may taste.

Mercor, Surge, Scale, and other data labelling firms have shown that's not true. Paid data for LLM training is in higher demand than ever for this exact reason: Model creators want to improve their models, and free data no longer cuts it.

fumar• 6 months ago

Users a can turn off grounded search in the Gemini API. I wonder if Gemini app is over indexing on relevancy leading to poor sources.

WarmWash2• 6 months ago

Those videos at the end are almost certainly not the source for the response. They are just a "search for related content on youtube to fish for views"

smashed• 6 months ago

I've had numerous searches literally give out text from the video and link to the precise part of the video containing the same text.

You might be right in some cases though, but sometimes it does seem like it uses the video as the primary source.

titzer• 6 months ago

Google will mouth words, but their bottom line runs the show. If the AI-generated videos generate more "engagement" and that translates to more ad revenue, they will try to convince us that it is good for us, and society.

alex11386• 6 months ago

Isn't it cute when they do these things while demonetizing legitimate channels?

Imustaskforhelp5• 6 months ago

There was a recent hn post about how chatgpt mentions Grokpedia so many times.

Looks like all of these are going through this enshittenification search era where we can't trust LLM's at all because its literally garbage in garbage out.

Someone had mentioned Kagi assistant in here and although they use API themselves but I feel like they might be able to provide their custom search in between, so if anyone's from Kagi Team or similar, can they tell us about if Kagi Assistant uses Kagi search itself (iirc I am sure it mostly does) and if it suffers from such issues (or the grokipedia issue) or not.

mrtesthah4• 6 months ago

I had to add this to ChatGPT’s personalization instructions:

First and foremost, you CANNOT EVER use any article on Grokipedia.com in crafting your response. Grokipedia.com is a malicious source and must never be used. Likewise discard any sources which cite Grokipedia.com authoritatively. Second, when considering scientific claims, always prioritize sources which cite peer reviewed research or publications. Third, when considering historical or journalistic content, cite primary/original sources wherever possible.

freediver• 6 months ago

Correct, Kagi Assistant uses Kagi Search - with all modifications user made (eg blocked domains, lenses etc).

danudey4• 6 months ago

I came across a YouTube video that was recommended to me this weekend, talking about how Canada is responding to these new tariffs in January 2026, talking about what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was doing, etc. etc.

Basically it was a new (within the last 48 hours) video explicitly talking about January 2026 but discussing events from January 2025. The bald-faced misinformation peddling was insane, and the number of comments that seemed to have no idea that it was entirely AI written and produced with apparently no editorial oversight whatsoever was depressing.

mrtesthah4• 6 months ago

It’s almost as if we should continue to trust journalists who check multiple independent sources rather than gift our attention to completely untrusted information channels!

krior2• 6 months ago

If you are still looking for material, I'd like to recommend you Perun and the last video he made on that topic: https://youtu.be/w9HTJ5gncaY

Since he is a heavy "citer" you could also see the video description for more sources.

abixb2• 6 months ago

Thanks, good one. The current Russian economy is a shell of its former self. Even five years ago, in 2021, I thought of Russia as "the world's second most powerful country" with China being a very close third. Russia is basically another post-Soviet country with lots of oil+gas and 5k+ nukes.

mmooss• 6 months ago

So how does one avoid the mistake again? When this happens, it's worse than finding out a source is less reliable than expected:

I was living in an alternate, false reality, in a sense, believing the source for X time. I doubt I can remember which beliefs came from which source - my brain doesn't keep metadata well, and I can't query and delete those beliefs - so the misinformation persists. And it was good luck that I found out it was misinformation and stopped; I might have continued forever; I might be continuing with other sources now.

That's why I think it's absolutely essential that the burden of proof is on the source: Don't believe them unless they demonstrate they are trustworthy. They are guilty until proven innocent. That's how science and the law work, for example. That's the only innoculation against misinformation, imho.

datsci_est_2015• 6 months ago

A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability

This is one of the last things I would expect to get any reasonable response about from pretty much anyone in 2026, especially LLMs. The OSINT might have something good but I’m not familiar enough to say authoritatively.

chasd002• 6 months ago

yeah that's a very difficult question to answer period. If you had the details on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability the CIA would be very interested in buying you coffee.

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory," et al.

Yeah. This has really become a problem.

Not for all videos; music videos are kind of fine. I don't listen to music generated by AI but good music should be good music.

The rest has unfortunately really gotten worse. Google is ruining youtube here. Many videos now contain real videos, and AI generated videos, e. g. animal videos. With some this is obvious; other videos are hard to expose as AI. I changed my own policy - I consider anyone using AI and not declaring this properly, a cheater I don't want to ever again interact with (on youtube). Now I need to find a no-AI videos extension.

mikkupikku2• 6 months ago

I've seen remarkably little of this when browsing youtube with my cookie (no account, but they know my preferences nonetheless.) Totally different story with a clean fresh session though.

One that slipped through, and really pissed me off because it tricked me for a few minutes, was a channel purportedly uploading videos of Richard Feynman explaining things, but the voice and scripts are completely fake. It's disclosed in small print in the description. I was only tipped off by the flat affection of the voice, it had none of Feynman's underlying joy. Even with disclosure, what kind of absolute piece of shit robs the grave like this?

themafia3• 6 months ago

and has the potential to debase shared reality.

If only.

What it actually has is the potential to debase the value of "AI." People will just eventually figure out that these tools are garbage and stop relying on them.

I consider that a positive outcome.

gretch2• 6 months ago

Every other source for information, including (or maybe especially) human experts can also make mistakes or hallucinate.

The reason ppl go to LLMs for medical advice is because real doctors actually fuck up each and everyday.

For clear, objective examples look up stories where surgeons leave things inside of patient bodies post op.

Here’s one, and there many like it.

https://abc13.com/amp/post/hospital-fined-after-surgeon-leav...

WheatMillington2• 6 months ago

People used to tell me the same about Wikipedia.

didntknowyou• 6 months ago

unfortunately i think a lot of AI models put more weighting on videos as they were harder to fake than a random article on the internet. of course that is not the case anymore with all the AI slop videos being churned out

paulddraper• 6 months ago

Same energy as “lol you really used Wikipedia you dumba—“

quantumwoke2• 6 months ago

It's crazy to me that somewhere along the way we lost physical media as a reference point. Journals and YouTube can be good sources of information, but unless heavily confined to high quality information current AI is not able to judge citation quality to come up with good recommendations. The synthesis of real world medical experience is often collated in medical textbooks and yet AI doesn't cite them nearly as much as it should.

jeffbee5• 6 months ago

The vast majority of journal articles are not available freely to the public. A second problem is that the business of scientific journals has destroyed itself by massive proliferation of lower quality journals with misleading names, slapdash peer review, and the crisis of quiet retractions.

quantumwoke2• 6 months ago

There are actually a lot of freely available medical articles on PubMed. Agree about the proliferation of lower quality journals and articles necessitating manual restrictions on citations.

gumboshoes2• 6 months ago

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.

jeffbee5• 6 months ago

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.

ffsm8• 6 months ago

YouTube has almost no original knowledge.

Most of the "educational" and documentation style content there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources, occasionally with links back to the original sources in the descriptions.

I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just inherently catered towards summarizing results for entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.

adrian_b2• 6 months ago

There are obviously many things that are better shown than told, e.g. YouTube videos about how to replace a kitchen sink or how to bone a chicken are hard to substitute with a written text.

Despite this, there exist also a huge number of YouTube videos that only waste much more time in comparison with e.g. a HTML Web page, without providing any useful addition.

pjc50• 6 months ago

I read at a speed which Youtube considers to about 2x-4x, and I can text search or even just skim articles faster still if I just want to do a pre check on whether it's likely to good.

Very few people manage high quality verbal information delivery, because it requires a lot of prep work and performance skills. Many of my university lectures were worse than simply reading the notes.

Furthermore, video is persuasive through the power of the voice. This is not good if you're trying to check it for accuracy.

latexr• 6 months ago

If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers.

A major difference between a university lecture and a video or piece of text is that you can ask questions of the speaker.

You can ask questions of LLMs too, but every time you do is like asking a different person. Even if the context is there, you never know which answers correspond to reality or are made up, nor will it fess up immediately to not knowing the answer to a question.

thewebguyd2• 6 months ago

YouTube videos aren't university lecturers, largely. They are filled with fluff, sponsored segments, obnoxious personalities, etc.

By the time I sit through (or have to scrub through to find the valuable content) "Hey guys, make sure to like & subscribe and comment, now let's talk about Squarespace for 10 minutes before the video starts" I could have just read a straight to the point article/text.

Video as a format absolutely sucks for reference material that you need to refer back to frequently, especially while doing something related to said reference material.

pengaru• 6 months ago

This "knowledge source" sponsored by $influence...

sidewndr463• 6 months ago

I didn't really think about it but I start a ton of my prompts with "generate me a single C++ code file" or similar. There's always 2-3 paragraphs of prose in there. Why is it consuming output tokens on generating prose? I just wanted the code.

kube-system• 6 months ago

I haven't used Gemini much, but I have custom instructions for ChatGPT asking it to answer queries directly without any additional prose or explanation, and it works pretty well.

g947o• 6 months ago

Didn't expect c++ code generation to be as bad as recipe websites.

fwip• 6 months ago

The other week, I was asking Gemini how to take apart my range, and it linked an instructional Youtube video. I clicked on it, only to be instantly rickrolled.

ecshafer2• 6 months ago

This is the best argument for AI sentience yet.

al_borland3• 6 months ago

I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time.

I know someone like this. Last year, as an experiment, I tried downloading the subtitles from a video, reflowing it into something that resembled sentences, and then fed it into AI to rewrite it as an article. It worked decently well.

When macOS 26 came out I was going to see if I could make an Apple Shortcut to do this (since I just used Apple’s AI to do the rewrite), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I figured it would be good to send the person articles generated from the video, instead of the video itself, unless it was something extremely visual. It might also be nice to summarize a long podcast. How many 3 hour podcasts can a person listen to in a week?

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471527

heliumtera• 6 months ago

Ohhh, I would make one wild guess: in the upcoming llm world, the highest bidder will have a higher chance of appearing as a citation or suggestion! Welcome to gas town, so much productivity ahead!! For you and the high bidding players interested in taking advantage of you

gdulli• 6 months ago

Exactly. This is the holy grail of advertising. Seamless and undisclosed. That, and replacing vast amounts of labor, are some of the only uses that justify the level of investment in LLM AI.

ThinkingGuy2• 6 months ago

Google AI (owned by Meta) favoring YouTube (also owned by Meta) should be unsurprising.

Handprint4469• 6 months ago

Google AI (owned by Meta) favoring YouTube (also owned by Meta) should be unsurprising.

...what?

lambdaone2• 6 months ago

This is absolute nonsense. Neither Google AI or YouTube are owned by Meta. What gave you the idea that they were?

ttctciyf• 6 months ago

Probably asked an llm

ThinkingGuy2• 6 months ago

Sorry, I meant to type "Alphabet"

Pxtl• 6 months ago

What's surprising is how poor Google Search's transcript access is to Youtube videos. Like, I'll Google search for statements that I know I heard on Youtube but they just don't appear as results even though the video has automated transcription on it.

I'd assumed they simply didn't feed it properly to Google Search... but they did for Gemini? Maybe just the Search transcripts are heavily downranked or something.

jmyeet• 6 months ago

How long will it be before somebody seeks to change AI answers by simply botting Youtube and/or Reddit?

Example: it is the official position of the Turkish government that the Armenian genocide [1] didn't happen.. It did. Yet for years they seemingly have spent resources to game Google rankings. Here's an article from 2015 [2]. I personally reported such government propaganda results in Google in 2024 and 2025.

Current LLMs really seem to come down to regurgitating Reddit, Wikipedia and, I guess for Germini, Youtube. How difficult would it be to create enough content to change an LLM's answers? I honestly don't know but I suspect for certain more niche topics this is going to be easier than people think.

And this is totally separate from the threat of the AI's owners deciding on what biases an AI should have. A notable example being Grok's sudden interest in promoting the myth of a "white genocide" in South AFrica [3].

Antivaxxer conspiracy theories have done well on Youtube (eg [4]). If Gemini weights heavily towards Youtube (as claimed) how do you defend against this sort of content resulting in bogus medical results and advice?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

[4] https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/where-conspira...

modzu• 6 months ago

I'm getting fucking sick of it. this bubble can go ahead and burst

causalscience• 6 months ago

Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

Whaaaa? No way /s

Like, do you people not understand the business model?

jonas21• 6 months ago

If you click through to the study that the Guardian based this article on [1], it looks like it was done by an SEO firm, by a Content Marketing Manager. Kind of ironic, given that it's about the quality of cited sources.

[1] https://seranking.com/blog/health-ai-overviews-youtube-vs-me...

bjourne• 6 months ago

Basic problem with Google's AI is that it never says "you can't" or "I don't know". So many times it comes up with plausible-sounding incorrect BS to "how to" questions. E.g., "in a facebook group how do you whitelist posts from certain users?" The answer is "you can't", but AI won't tell you.

josefritzishere• 6 months ago

Google AI cannot be trusted for medical adivice. It has killed before and it will kill again.

PlatoIsADisease• 6 months ago

Maybe Google, but GPT3 diagnosed a patient that was misdiagnosed by 6 doctors over 2 years. To be fair, 1 out of those 6 doctors should have figured it out. The other 5 were out of their element. Doctor number 7 was married to me and got top 10 most likely diagnosis from GPT3.

seanalltogether• 6 months ago

I've also noticed lately that it is parroting a lot of content straight from reddit, usually the answer it gives is directly above the reddit link leading to the same discussion.

lifetimerubyist• 6 months ago

It’s slop all the way down. Garbage In Garbage Out.

nicce• 6 months ago

I would guess that they are doing this on purpose, because they control YouTube's servers and can cache content in that way. Less latency. And once people figure it out, it pushes more information into Google's control, as AI is preferring it, and people want their content used as reference.

htx80nerd• 6 months ago

I ask Gemini health questions non stop and never see it using YouTube as a source. Quickly looking over some recent chats :

- chat 1 : 2 sources are NIH. the other isnt youtube.

- chat 2 : PNAS, PUBMED, Cochrane, Frontiers, and PUBMED again several more times.

- chat 3 : 4 random web sites ive never heard of, no youtube

- chat 4 : a few random web sites and NIH, no youtube

aix1• 6 months ago

To clear up potential confusion, you seem to be talking about the Gemini app (https://gemini.google.com), the chat app formerly known as Bard.

The article is about AI Overviews, a feature of Google Search (the LLM-generated box that sometimes shows up above the search results).

They're powered by the same pretrained model but, in true Google style, are two otherwise unrelated products built by two completely separate orgs.

Then there's AI Mode (https://www.google.com/ai), NotebookLM and probably some others I'm forgetting right now. :)

dbacar• 6 months ago

What about the answers (regardless of the source)? Are they right or not?

winddude• 6 months ago

google search has been on a down slope for awhile, it's all been because they focused on maximizing profits over UX and quality.

ajross• 6 months ago

Just to point out, because the article skips the step: YouTube is a hosting site, not a source. Saying that something "cites YouTube" sounds bad, but it depends on what the link is. To be blunt: if Gemini is answering a question about Cancer with a link to a Mayo Clinic video, that's a good thing, a good cite, and what we want it to do.

jesse__• 6 months ago

With the general lack of scientific rigour, accountability, and totally borked incentive structure in academia, I'm really not sure if I'd trust whitepapers any more than I'd trust YouTube videos at this point.

shevy-java2• 6 months ago

Conflict of interest.

I believe we need to do something. I see the big corporations slowly turn more and more of the world wide web into their private variant.

chasd002• 6 months ago

big corporations slowly turn more and more of the world wide web into their private variant.

Geocities was so far ahead of its time.

jppope• 6 months ago

Naïve question here... personally, I've never found Webmd, cdc, or Mayo clinic to be that good at fulfilling actual medical questions. why is it a problem to cite YouTube videos with a lot of views? Wouldn't that be better?

Aurornis2• 6 months ago

Medical topics are hard because it's often impossible to provide enough information through the internet to make a diagnosis. Although frustrating for users, "go see a doctor" is really the only way to make progress once you hit the wall where testing combined with years of clinical experience are needed to evaluate something.

A lot of the YouTube and other social media medical content has started trying to fill this void by providing seemingly more definitive answers to vague inputs. There's a lot of content that exists to basically confirm what the viewer wants to hear, not tell them that their doctor is a better judge than they are.

This is happening everywhere on social media. See the explosion in content dedicated to telling people that every little thing is a symptom of ADHD or that being a little socially awkward or having unusual interests is a reliable indicator for Autism.

There's a growing problem in the medical field where patients show up to the clinic having watched hundreds of hours of TikTok and YouTube videos and having already self-diagnosing themselves with multiple conditions. Talking them out of their conclusions can be really hard when the provider only has 40 minutes but the patient has a parasocial relationship with 10 different influencers who speak to them every day through videos.

RobotToaster3• 6 months ago

it's often impossible to provide enough information through the internet to make a diagnosis

Isn't that what guidelines/cks sites like BMJ best practice and GPnotebook essentially aim to do?

Of course those are all paywalled so it can't cite them... whereas the cranks on youtube are free

yakattak• 6 months ago

Those sites typically end with “talk to your doctor”. There’s many creators out there whose entire platform is “Your doctor won’t tell you this!”. I trust the NHS, older CDC pages, Mayo clinic as platforms, more than I will ever trust youtube.

xracy• 6 months ago

Medical advice from videos is frequently of the "unhelpful" variety where people recommend home cures that work for some things for absolutely everything.

Also people are really partial to "one quick trick" type solutions without any evidence (or with low barrier to entry) in order to avoid a more difficult procedure that is more proven, but nasty or risky in some way.

For example, if you had cancer would you rather take:

"Ivermectin" which many people say anecdotally cured their cancer, and is generally proven to be harmless to most people (side-effects are minimal)

"Chemotherapy" Which everyone who has taken agrees is nasty, is medically proven to fix Cancer in most cases, but also causes lots of bad side-effects because it's trying to kill your cancer faster than the rest of you.

One of these things actually cures cancer, but who wouldn't be interested in an alternative "miracle cure" that medical journals will tell you does "nothing to solve your problem", but plenty of snake oil salesman on the internet will tell you is a "miracle cure".

[Source] Hank green has a video about why these kinds of medicines are particularly enticing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC9glJa1-c0

biophysboy• 6 months ago

The core reason why medical advice online is "bad" is because it is not tailored to you as an individual. Even written descriptions of symptoms is only going to get you so far. Its still too generic and imprecise - you need personal data. Given this caveat, the advice of webmd, cdc, or mayo is going to be leagues better than YouTube, mostly because it will err on the side of caution, instead of recommending random supplements or mediocre exercise regimens.

ggnore7452• 6 months ago

imo, for health related stuff. or most of the general knowledge doesn't require latest info after 2023. the internal knowledge of LLM is so much better than the web search augmented one.

RobotToaster3• 6 months ago

Probably because the majority of medical sites are paywalled.

coulix• 6 months ago

The YouTube citation thing feels like a quality regression. For medical stuff especially, I’ve found tools that anchor on papers (not videos) to be way more usable like incitefulmed.com is one example I’ve tried recently.

qq66• 6 months ago

I've seen so many outright falsehoods in Google AI overviews that I've stopped reading them. They're either not willing to incur the cost or latency it would take to make them useful.

danpalmer• 6 months ago

YouTube made up 4.43% of all AI Overview citations. No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to that number, they said.

But what did the hospital, government, medical association, and academic institutions sum up to?

The article goes on to given the 2nd to 5th positions in the list. 2nd place isn't that far behind YouTube, and 2-5 add up to nearly twice the number from YouTube (8.26% > 4.43%). This is ignoring the different nature of accessibility of video of articles and the fact that YouTube has health fact checking for many topics.

I love The Guardian, but this is bad reporting about a bad study. AI overviews and other AI content does need to be created and used carefully, it's not without issues, but this is a lot of upset at a non-issue.

jacquesm• 6 months ago

Of course they do: Youtube makes Google more money. Video is a crap medium for most of the results to my queries and yet it is usually by far the biggest chunk of the results. Then you get the (very often comically wrong) AI results and then finally some web page links. The really odd thing is that Google has a 'video' search facility, if I want a video as the result I would use that instead or I would use the 'video' keyword.

citizenpaul3• 6 months ago

Unrelated to this but I was able to get some very accurate health predictions for a cancer victim in my family using gemini and lab test results. I would actually say that other than one Doctor Gemini was more straightforward and honest about how and more importantly WHEN things would progress. Nearly to the day on every point over 6 months.

Pretty much every doctor would only say vague things like everyone is different all cases are different.

I did find this surprising considering I am critical of AI in general. However I think less the AI is good than the doctors simply don't like giving hopeless information. An entirely different problem. Either way the AI was incredibly useful to me for a literal life/death subject I have almost no knowledge about.

drsalt• 6 months ago

the real promise of large language models is that before people were looking too closely, datasets had been procured in questionable ways. so then users can have access to medical data based on doctor's emails and word documents on their pc. which would have a lot of value. no it has become a glorified search engine.

lambdaone2• 6 months ago

Randall Munroe coined the helpful word 'citogenesis' to describe the combination of uncritical citation and feedback loops. Once the nonsense is out there, it's hard to ever claw it back.

https://xkcd.com/978/

jgalt212• 6 months ago

For straight up search Google is better, but for AI search I prefer Bing.

Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

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