After a report revealed that Google's AI Overviews were providing potentially misleading responses to specific health-related questions, the company seems to have disabled the feature for some of those searches. The original investigation noted that a query like “what is the normal range for liver blood tests” returned numerical ranges without accounting for variables such as nationality, sex, ethnicity, or age, which could incorrectly reassure users about their results.

It has now been observed that AI Overviews no longer appear for searches including “what is the normal range for liver blood tests” and “what is the normal range for liver function tests.” However, similar queries, such as “lft reference range” or “lft test reference range,” were initially found to still trigger AI-generated summaries. When tested several hours after the report was published, those variations also no longer displayed AI Overviews, though Google continued to offer the option to rerun the query in AI Mode. In multiple instances, the top organic search result was the article detailing the removal.

A Google spokesperson stated that the company does not discuss individual removals in Search but emphasized ongoing efforts to implement broad improvements. The spokesperson added that an internal clinical team reviewed the flagged queries and determined that, in many cases, the information presented was not inaccurate and was backed by high-quality websites.

Last year, Google introduced new features designed to enhance healthcare-related searches, including upgraded overviews and health-specific AI models. Vanessa Hebditch, Director of Communications and Policy at the British Liver Trust, welcomed the removal as “excellent news” but expressed a broader concern: focusing on a single search result allows Google to simply turn off AI Overviews for that term without addressing the larger issue of AI-generated health information overall.