This week, my family has been buzzing with excitement for our first trip to the College World Series in Omaha.
With our new home-state Huskers out, we threw our support behind our previous home state team, the LSU Tigers, hoping they'd be playing in the game for which we had tickets.
Early one morning before I had finished my first coffee, my wife, surprised at our luck, told me she saw online that LSU would indeed be in that game. Eager to confirm and view the bracket, I went straight to trusted sources --newspaper media and the NCAA website -- to check the schedule.
But LSU wasn’t in the game we are attending. In fact, they were on the opposite side of the bracket. So, where did she get the information?
She pointed to the top result on Google’s AI Overview, which had pulled in outdated information — last year’s, in fact. And that’s when the letdown set in.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen. It’s why I’ll glance at Google’s AI summary, but then scroll down to check the actual links. Often, what it gives you looks confident, but it’s just plain wrong.
Let me be clear: I’m not anti-AI.
In fact, I’m using AI right now to help research and draft this column. It’s a powerful tool when used wisely. But tools should help us, not replace diligence and accuracy. What happened with the bracket is a small mistake, sure — but it’s emblematic of a bigger issue.
Google’s AI Overview has been caught serving up a range of misleading, incorrect, and sometimes dangerous content. From telling people to add glue to pizza to citing completely incorrect medical and historical facts, AI “hallucinations” have become a recurring problem.
A study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that in complex queries, AI search tools gave wrong answers 60% of the time. Even Google itself admitted to a 1.8% hallucination rate in internal testing — but at scale, that’s millions of mistakes a day.
The more frustrating part? AI is feeding off journalism, then undercutting it. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Google’s AI Overview scrapes and synthesizes information largely from traditional news publishers—without driving traffic back to those original sources.
That lack of traffic has real-world consequences.
Business Insider’s web traffic, for example, dropped 55% from April 2022 to April 2025. Other publishers have reported double-digit declines in search traffic after AI Overviews were implemented, often leading to layoffs and restructuring. This isn’t just a glitch — it’s a system that takes content without compensation and returns less to those who created it.
The News Media Alliance has accused Google of outright content theft, claiming it “copies and monetizes the content of others without paying” and that its AI deprives newsrooms of both visibility and value.
This matters deeply to me because I’m a fierce advocate for community journalism—not to be confused with the polarizing, sometimes toxic circus of cable news. Newspapers, especially local ones, are embedded in towns and cities in ways no AI will ever replicate.
Studies have shown that when a community loses its newspaper, taxes go up, government spending increases, corruption becomes more likely, and schools and health outcomes suffer. That’s not conjecture. That’s data from multiple studies and policy reviews.
Newspapers represent only about 25% of local media outlets, yet they generate nearly 50% of original reporting and 60% of all local news.. The rest of the news ecosystem—TV, radio, and social media—often just repackages or amplifies what newspapers produce.
So when AI Overview steals a newspaper’s work to provide a free summary at the top of the search page, it’s not just bad for journalists—it’s bad for your town.
The implications stretch into the business world as well. In a recent presentation by industry analyst Gordon Borrell of Borrelll Associates, the uncertainty around AI search was called one of the biggest unknowns in digital advertising. With AI Overviews summarizing search queries, fewer users are clicking through to websites—meaning all that hard work put into SEO/SEM may never be seen.
Yes, organic content might help a business get mentioned in the summary. But that summary still pushes the link down the page, and it’s unclear how many people actually click past it.
Paid search listings may become even more expensive and competitive as businesses try to reclaim lost ground. AI isn’t just changing search—it’s rewriting the rules of discoverability and digital strategy.
This isn’t about trying to avoid AI. It’s about accuracy. It’s about fairness. And it’s about the kind of informed society we all want to live in.
Because at the end of the day, when AI gets it wrong, the consequences don’t just stay online. They show up in your life, in your town, and even in your seat at a baseball game.
Jerry Raehal is the Chief Growth Officer of OnePress, which is the marketing arm of the Nebraska Press Association. You can reach him at jerry@onepressne.com or at (531) 249-1662.