A photographer I knew passed away, and I was trying to see if there was any information. This was the top result I got on google. The part after the ellipses says “killed in a plane accident in Pantanal.”

He did not die in the plane accident! That’s another piece of Brazilian news, about the architect Kongjian Yu. The search result is even tagged with Yu’s Sponge City/Cidade Esponja.

So why is this showing up for a post summary about José Bassit? There’s nothing in the post comments or the post itself saying anything like this.

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users[1] and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion[2], I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/zuckerberg-meta-ai-one-billion-monthly-users.html
[2] https://www.theverge.com/news/655930/google-q1-2025-earnings

Keyword Research and SEO are entire industries today. There are tools like ahrefs and semrush that promise to give you "trending" topic keywords for a sum of monthly subscription money.

However, you can discard all their claims using a similar logic that you use to discard the claims of Astrologers, Voodooists, Stock Experts who "recommend" stocks, etc:

1. If an Astrologer knows the future of everyone, wouldn't they profit massively from it themselves using the information rather than telling the trick to everyone else (just for a pittance)?
2. If a Stock Expert knew that a stock's price will go up (and how much), won't they invest thousands and make millions themselves instead of giving those "tips" to "subscribers" and again, earn only a pittance?
3. If SEO and Search Marketing companies knew exactly which keywords can rank your blog or site in the Google Search Engine, won't they write articles on those topics/keywords themselves and profit massively with the page views instead of revealing that secret to you for merely a few cents!