The AI Overviews are... extremely bad. For most of my queries, Google's AI Overview misrepresents its own citations, or almost as bad, confidently asserts a falsehood or half-truth based on results that don't actually contain an answer to my search query.

I had the same issue with Kagi, where I'd follow the citation and it would say the opposite of the summary.

A human can make sense of search results with a little time and effort, but current AI models don't seem to be able to.

I find myself skipping the AI overview like I used to skip over "Sponsored" results back in the day, looking for a trustworthy domain name.

Those AI overviews are dumb and wrong so often I have cut them out of the results entirely. They're embarrassing, really.

It’s fine about 80% of the time, but the other 20% is a lot harder to answer because of lower quality results.

From a UX perspective, the AI overview summary being a multi-paragraph summary makes sense since that was a single query that isn't expected to have conversational context. Where it does not make sense is in conversation-based interfaces. Like, the most popular product is literally called "chat".

"I ask a short and vague question and you response with a scrollbar-full of information based on some invalid assumptions" is not, by any reasonable definition, a "chat".