After a Guardian investigation revealed that Google’s AI Overviews were providing potentially misleading answers to certain health-related questions, the tech giant appears to have withdrawn the feature from some of those searches.
The Guardian had previously reported that queries such as “what is the normal range for liver blood tests” triggered AI-generated responses that failed to consider variables like age, sex, ethnicity, or nationality. This omission risked giving users the impression that their test results were normal when they may not have been.
According to the newspaper, AI Overviews are now no longer shown for searches including “what is the normal range for liver blood tests” and *“what is the normal range for liver function tests.” However, it noted that similar phrasing — such as “lft reference range” or “lft test reference range” — could still produce AI-written summaries.
When these alternative queries were tested several hours after the Guardian published its findings, none returned AI Overviews, although Google continued to offer users the option to rerun the searches using AI Mode. In some cases, the Guardian’s own report on the issue appeared as the top search result.
Responding to the report, a Google spokesperson told the Guardian that the company does not “comment on individual removals within Search,” but said it is continually working to “make broad improvements.” The spokesperson added that an internal team of clinicians had reviewed the queries highlighted by the investigation and concluded that, in many cases, the information provided was not inaccurate and was supported by high-quality sources.
