Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BIDamian Mansell was stunned to see what Google was saying about his nascent business. When he searched for reviews of The Plastics Shed — the online building-plastics supplier he incorporated at the start of 2025 — the platform's AI overview said customer feedback was "overwhelmingly negative." It listed complaints about delayed deliveries, lying staff, and damaged products. While the company had some positive feedback, the summary said, its poor customer service was a "significant recurring issue." The good news: The reviews weren't actually about Mansell's company. They appeared to be for competitors and companies that sold actual plastic sheds. The bad news: He had no idea what to do about it.Mansell, who lives in the UK, says. "I can see how that happens, but why should it happen with Google?" Mansell, who lives in the UK. "I mean, obviously, the forefront of AI technology."To make matters worse, Mansell was paying Google about £700 a month to advertise, while the summaries warned people away. Following advice he found on online forums, he repeatedly submitted feedback to Google that the abstract was wrong. After a couple of weeks, it started to improve. AI has been an invaluable tool for him to build out his business, so he doesn't want to malign the tech in general, but he wishes there were more accountability when things go awry."AI gives the common man the knowledge, but it can also ruin the common man," he says.Google's AI Overviews are rapidly becoming consumers' first impression of businesses. Instead of scanning reviews and websites, many users see a single synopsis that purports to blend information from across the internet into a comprehensive digest. When those summaries are inaccurate, misleading, or jumbled, business owners say they can cause serious reputational damage and financial losses, and there's often little recourse.Mansell still wonders how much business the issue cost him. He's tried to get Google to refund some of his ad dollars, but he hasn't had any luck, despite his best efforts."I'm like a dog with a bone," he says. "But I met my match with Google."Internet search has changed drastically in the last few years: Instead of a list of links, Google often provides a single response that's supposed to summarize the constellation of online information. These overviews look right and sound confident, but they draw on a litany of sources with varying levels of reliability. They can even spit out information that is flat-out wrong. (Like recommending people make glue pizza.) Misinformation on the internet isn't new, but the clean, concise, AI-concocted package is."With the traditional search engine, the user sees multiple things. So if one of them has something wrong, chances are something else would counterbalance it," says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School. That's now gone, and with AI overviews, you're getting "The Answer," which may or may not be correct.I look at the AI overview, I wouldn't call me.For business owners, the consequences can be more than a mild annoyance or temporary confusion. These AI summaries are becoming their digital storefronts. Across the internet, you can find entrepreneurs and managers grumbling that AI summaries mix them up with other companies, surface complaints that are directed at someone else, or dole out false facts.Earlier this year, Betty Whitney started noticing that Google's overviews were conflating her company — NW Select Property Management in Idaho — with similarly named businesses. The top panel seemed to be merging her firm with one in the region that closed years ago and mixing her reviews up with property managers in other states."If I'm a customer, and I'm looking for a property management company, and I look at the AI overview, I wouldn't call me," she says.Whitney has spent months trying to amend the situation. Like Mansell, she's used Google's feedback mechanism to give overviews a "thumbs down" when they're wrong, and she's made some adjustments to her website to try to feed the AI crawlers more accurate data. After bringing her problem to a Google support forum, she got in touch with a third-party SEO expert who was able to help her out — sort of. The overview has gotten better, but it still periodically reverts to the mistake-filled version.Three years after relocating, Philippa Main, a real estate agent in Northern Virginia, still can't completely convince Google that she's no longer in Florida. When she searches her name, most of the information that comes up about her is correct, but then there's a line that confidently states that she's been "servicing the Tampa Bay area since 2014," even though it sits right above her Virginia address. Main's tried everything she could think of to get it adjusted, combing the internet to try to find where the AI is drawing from, emailing Google, and asking friends to report the issue."There's so much competition in my i
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