I am the founder of an SEO and Digital Marketing agency focused on helping small businesses and solopreneurs thrive, a Futurologist who has authored accurate predictions about this moment of the future for over a decade, and a developer determined to put power into the hands of more humans not AI bots.

In the last 2-years Google has made being successful via organic traffic increasingly difficult and their forceful push for "AI" is a large part of the issues facing most small companies and solopreneurs struggling around the globe today. 

We are asking Google's CEO (Sundar Pichai), Chief Technologist (Prabhakar Raghavan), Director of Engineering (Ray Kurzweil), and Head of Search (Nick Fox) to immediately stop forcing AI search results and using AI as large parts of their once great algorithm and to start promoting high-quality web results yet again using sensible ranking factors instead of AI hallucinations. 

1. Since the introduction of AI Overviews at the top of Google search results more than 80,000 Chrome users have installed extensions to remove them like "Ultimasaurus", "Hide Google AI Overviews", and "Bye Bye, Google AI".  

2. A recent study by Columbia Journalism Review showed AI chatbots get the source article for a piece of information wrong on average of 60% of the time, with Google's own Gemini (which powers AI Overviews and AI Mode) being the single worst. Since these systems are next token prediction algorithms they do not "know" the source but instead make an educated guess, often completely making up URLs. 

3. AI Overviews frequently get answers wrong or ruin human experiences. For example a gamers playing of Hollow Knight was ruined by AI Overviews spoilers and inaccuracies while a website dedicated to gamer content was the right selection. Source

4. AI Overviews frequently just steal original content from authors / publishers and directly publish to users without permission and hide behind Section 230 protections which probably shouldn't apply. Source

5. Google's documentation says to make content for humans not search engines / bots, but Google also published a blog post titled "Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you". Publishers DID NOT create content to speak to AI robots, they created it for direct human consumption. If humans do not consume the content it will either stop being created OR be created for LLM-AI bots, making the web an increasingly worse place. Source 1​, Source 2

6. AI Overviews and it's bigger brother AI Mode try to hide sources as much as possible and make them appear unclickable / untappable. Sources, when accurate, are hidden behind tiny gray link icons and then displayed in a grayish colored box with nothing that appears clickable or similar to the "blue links" Google has displayed for almost 27-years and consumers are familiar with. 

7. Over a year and a half in, a growing number of experts believe at least the September version of Google's "Helpful Content Update" was not about helpful content at all and was about protecting Google's LLM-based AI from potentially inaccurate information sources OR simply eliminating small publishers and web-based creators from being ranked on topics they had previously been considered to be the best on for other unknown possibly AI-related reasons. Factors they all have in common are: Small, frequently have unique ideas or takes (i.e. not in consensus with larger brands), and often use affiliate programs to earn revenue. Larger publishers were mostly spared from this update. The web benefitted from the diversity of content and ideas these publishers brought and now suffers with underwhelming homogeneity. Theories and Leaks have shown Google is currently using "consensus" as a ranking factor of some kind.

8. Google's focus on AI appears to be allowing spammers who openly violate and flaunt Google's rules for listings on Google Maps to thrive. Reports of locations using well-known mailbox providers and virtual office providers - against Google's guidelines for being listed - have been ignored for over a year and the volume of these fake listings is increasing in major USA cities, directly harming small businesses as they struggle to gain phone calls and traffic to their websites while AI Overviews steals their content and never recommends users visit their site. This could likely stem from an internal shift of focus, putting more resources into the AI Overviews and associated systems than into ensuring fair play on Google Maps. Consumers are getting scammed and ripped off by non-existent companies that are not beholden to the laws of another country since they are typically operated in a foreign land. 

9. Without a healthy and thriving web, all AI systems will be rendered more useless. The web has existed as a thriving though imbalanced ecosystem for decades because creators were incentivized to generate content for the web in hopes of building a small business or even building a major tech company. As those incentives evaporate rapidly in the wake of the inaccurate and obnoxious AI Overviews and mass content theft perpetuated by Google's executives (listed above) the LLM-AI systems dependent on new and fresh content will falter and be found to be far less useful by consumers. Google's survival and enduring hegemony is directly tied to the open web being incentivized to create new, useful, helpful, creative, and inventive content. 

10. Even Google's own AI Overviews know that AI Overviews are too inaccurate to be trusted. A recent screenshot shows the AI Overviews citing the Mozilla foundation on how inaccurate AI Overviews are. Source

In short, Google your AI Overviews are harmful to consumers, harmful to content creators, and harmful to the web. 

Instead of forcing this abomination onto users so you can try to pump up your stock price, we the undersigned demand you make AI Overviews and other AI features "Opt In". That is users must turn these features ON to use them, not turn them off. And  you should keep them this way until a time that: 
👉 AI is far more accurate in the information it provides 
👉 AI is far more accurate in the sources it cites 
👉 AI encourages growth of the web in some direct way (i.e. clicks, recommendations [example: "I found this content on this page, go here to read more"], transactions, etc...) 
👉 Web creators can remove parts of their content from your AI systems without impacting the ability of other parts of content from being removed from your search engines. (i.e. can remove a paragraph or fact on page, part of a video, etc... not remove one full page or a full domain).