By Andrew Gregory
Publication Date: 2026-01-24 17:00:00
Do I have flu or Covid? Why do I wake up tired? What is causing the pain in my chest? For more than two decades, typing medical questions into the world’s most popular search engine results in a list of links to websites with answers. If you google health questions today, the answer will likely be written by artificial intelligence.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai first unveiled the company’s plans to incorporate AI into its search engine at its annual conference in May 2024 in Mountain View, California. Starting this month, he said, U.S. users would see a new feature, AI Overviews, which would provide information summaries on top of traditional search results. The change marked the biggest shakeup of Google’s core product in a quarter century. By July 2025, the technology had expanded to more than 200 countries in 40 languages, with 2 billion people serving AI insights every month.
With the rapid adoption of AI overviews, Google strives to protect…
