‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI
Google's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom. Photograph: John Keeble/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenGoogle's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews.
- ▪Google's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom.
- ▪Photograph: John Keeble/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenGoogle's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom.
- ▪The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews.
The Guardian — Tech publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 134 of its stories.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/23/google-readers-respond-ai-overview-internet-searches |
| Publication time | Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:51:12 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-23T20:04:30.667Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-23T20:04:30.667Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rGhuko_X0pGr · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Google's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom. Photograph: John Keeble/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenGoogle's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom. Photograph: John Keeble/Getty ImagesTechnology‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AIA feature called AI Overviews has been a profound change, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shiftingBlake MontgomeryWed 23 Sep 2026 15.51 EDTLast modified on Wed 23 Sep 2026 15.59 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleGoogle has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Tech.
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