What Will Change If You Use An AI Chatbot Instead Of Google Search?

These days, instead of entering a query into search engines like Google and perusing the results, more and more users have resorted to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini to get a summarized response. A 2026 Pew Research Center survey reportedly found that 42% of American adults had used AI chatbots for search queries and information gathering, while a 2026 report from Bain & Company reveals that 16% of U.S. consumers have been using them more frequently than search engines. And while it may be easier to type in your queries to these chat-like interfaces, there are risks that come with this sort of convenience. Depending on how specific your prompt is, some AI chatbots like Perplexity and Gemini provide citations at the end of their responses wherever applicable. Regardless, since AI chatbots often prioritize plausibility — like complex information rewritten into simpler explanations — the answers presented to you may be incomplete, difficult to trace, or in worse cases, taken out of context.

Typically, using a search engine will present you with a page full of links to relevant sites, leaving you to compare information, assess credibility, and reach your own conclusions yourself. Chatbots, on the other hand, condense the findings for you into a single, summarized response. That mental labor of examining what's real or fake, factual or incorrect, along with personally understanding and retaining the information you get from search engines, is replaced with an LLM. If you leave the process of discernment to an AI chatbot, it's only natural to wonder whether ChatGPT changes how your brain works.

Billions of people worldwide use Google every day, and the name itself became a verb tantamount to searching for information online. In May 2024, Google started showing AI-generated overviews right under the index of search results, which significantly altered the typical search experience. The feature has since drawn flak, from Gen Z users who can't stand AI to those who've dwelled within the internet for a while now. Many complain that, while it's a powerful feature, it is an unnecessary pop-up that may share incorrect data on a page where anyone can easily navigate to different sources of information. For instance, Lance Ulanoff, a journalist who has been using Google Search for over 25 years, wrote in his TechRadar op-ed: "there is simply no need to show AI Overviews when the current results are so good and accurate."

As of now, Google does not have a setting that disables AI overviews for every search. However, there are a few workarounds anyone can try. For one, you can add "-ai" to your query to immediately remove the AI-generated summary; or you can click the "More" tab under Google's search bar and select "Web," which will lead you to a page with just text-based links. On the other hand, if you are tired of Google's Gemini-powered search summaries, switching to a different search engine can be another option. Platforms like DuckDuckGo No-AI and Brave both provide settings for users to disable AI overviews and other similar AI-powered features.