Google AI Overviews 44% more prone to negative brand sentiment than ChatGPT
The tendency for AI chatbots and search engines to occasionally provide critical assessments of brands serves as a significant wake-up call for businesses, even if the trend is arguably beneficial for consumers.
Research conducted by SEO firm BrightEdge, which analyzed hundreds of millions of prompts across the apparel, electronics, and education sectors, revealed that Google’s AI Overviews were 44% more likely to present negative brand-related information compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, when users asked ChatGPT to compare two products, the results shifted, with ChatGPT proving more critical.
Although the vast majority of findings in the study were neutral or positive, a small fraction of responses were negative: 2.3% for Google’s AI Overviews and 1.6% for ChatGPT.
BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu noted that while these percentages appear minor, they represent a substantial volume of negative queries when scaled across hundreds of millions of results, potentially damaging a company’s reputation. Based on the study, for every million queries, approximately 23,000 could result in a negative response from AI Overviews.
Yu explained that Google, in particular, often surfaces negative information that may be years old due to how it aggregates web data. The nature of these results is heavily influenced by user search intent and the information publicly available about a brand.
“Instead of it being on the back pages that’s way further down, now it’s pulling it into the front page, as people are looking for things about your brand,” he said. “That’s a huge change for businesses.”
A Google spokesperson stated that the report relied on flawed methodology to generate sensationalist findings, noting that the actual difference in negative responses between the two platforms was a negligible 1%.
“It also misunderstands how AI Overviews work: They’re based on what sources on the web say about a topic and change depending on what someone is searching for,” the spokesperson added.
OpenAI did not provide a comment in response to a request.
To counter the prominence of negative information in AI results, companies should prioritize addressing nearly every negative online review, according to Matt Blumberg, CEO of Markup.AI, a firm that utilizes AI to evaluate marketing content.
“I do think it’s more important than ever, because those things are getting picked up more, and they’re getting picked up in different ways by different AI applications,” Blumberg stated.
The study highlights a fundamental change in how information is delivered to users. Yu observed that consumers are leveraging AI to conduct more thorough research, gaining a clearer and potentially more objective view of a product’s pros and cons.
For businesses, this shift necessitates a strategy of publishing fresh content to align with AI’s preference for recent information, while being deliberate about content placement.
“It’s a new dynamic that they do have to really think about,” Yu concluded.