Google search AI Mode era opens. What could go wrong?

If the AI lovefest of Google I/O 2025 were a TV show, you might be tempted to call it It’s Always Sunny in Mountain View. (It’s not, by the way, especially in the fog-filled month of May, even if the company’s confidence in booking an outdoor amphitheater suggests otherwise).

But here’s a better sitcom analogy for the event that added AI Mode to all U.S. search results, whether we want it or not. It’s The Good Place, in which our late heroes are repeatedly assured that they’ve gone to a better world. A place where everything is fine, all is as it seems, and search quality just keeps getting better.

Don’t worry about ever-present and increasing AI hallucinations here in the Good Place, where the word “hallucination” isn’t even used. Forget about the one live demo (among a dozen prerecorded ones) that went spectacularly wrong, where two presenters failed to translate each others’ words via their Google AI glasses. Responsible AI, the focus of Google I/O 2023, went unmentioned.

Skyrocketing AI data center usage contributing to global warming? In the Good Place, Google AI is fighting global warming by helping to pinpoint wildfires. Don’t think too hard about that one.

And as for that whole Hollywood strike that lasted nearly a year, largely over creatives’ concerns about studios using AI? Fuggedaboutit. Creative folk love AI in the Good Place — just listen to the testimonials from the filmmakers and musicians Google has cherry-picked!

Is Google search the Bad Place?

Meanwhile, SEO experts warn, search results continue to get worse with AI Mode-style overviews. According to internal memos obtained in the ongoing Department of Justice lawsuit, which the DOJ just won, Google has a perverse incentive to make them that way.

“If users don’t get what they want the first time, they have to search again,” says Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy at Amsive, and the author of a recent viral LinkedIn post, Google AI Overviews Have a Major Spam Problem. “So if you’re serving them multiple AI overviews because they have to search multiple times, Google can then say ‘we have more people using AI every day.’ It’s like, ‘yeah, but there’s no way to turn it off.'”

Or to put it in the plot-pivoting words of The Good Place‘s Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell): “Wait a minute. This is the Bad Place!”

Google has a roughly 90 percent share of the search market, after all; it can afford to make the product worse by using AI so long as investors keep juicing the stocks of AI-heavy companies. It can pretend to look like the Good Place for search, while under the hood it’s anything but.

Like Eleanor Shellstrop, however, users know what’s up. Google search results have “kind of become the laughingstock of the Internet,” Ray says. “Whenever Google communicates about AI Overviews, they say ‘our users really love it.’ But then when you read Google Forum, it’s always like ‘how do I turn this thing off, I want Google search back.'” (Even turning AI search off, according to one Google Forum user, doesn’t turn it off.)

As in The Good Place, this awareness may not do a lick of good. If investors continue to reward Google for frothy presentations filled with cool-sounding AI features, there’s no incentive for quality control. As often appears to be the case in 2025, we have to get used to living in separate realities.

So users may breathe a little easier knowing that Google stock fell by 1.5 percent in the aftermath of I/O (and is down 12 percent in 2025 as a whole). Is that enough to nudge the company to pay attention?

It would take Google I/O levels of Pollyanna optimism to think so. Instead, let’s draw our attention to a Good Place fact you won’t find easily in AI Mode. It took demon Michael (Ted Danson) 300 years to stop resetting Eleanor’s memories every time she realized she was in the Bad Place.

So, only a few hundred years to go before Google is working for us again. Everything is fine.