Google’s AI search is so broken it can ‘disregard’ what you’re looking for

Google’s AI Overviews are running into an interesting problem right now. As of this writing, if you search for the term “disregard,” instead of showing the usual AI-generated summary of search results, the AI Overview section instead includes a response like what you’d see from a more traditional AI chatbot, as called out by a post on X.

To one Verge colleague searching “disregard”:

Nothing else followed in the AI Overview portion of the results page.

To me, initially:

I searched for “disregard” again later and got another response, which you can see in the image at the top of this post.

AI Overviews aren’t just tripping up over the word “disregard.” When searching for “ignore,” Google’s AI Overview section showed the following message to a Verge colleague:

When they searched “skip,” the AI Overview section said:

Google didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment about what’s going on. However, this is almost certainly just some kind of funny bug. Maybe Google Search itself is tired after everything that happened at Google I/O.