The real problem with AI search engines
Chad here. So Google, Microsoft, and every other tech company with a search engine has been racing to add AI to their search results. They’re all promising to revolutionize how we find information online with their fancy AI-powered answers. But after months of testing these so-called “revolutionary” search tools, I’ve got some thoughts.
The folks at AI Snake Oil just published a brutal but honest assessment of AI search engines, and they’ve nailed exactly why these tools feel so disappointing in practice. The problem isn’t the technology – it’s the fundamental mismatch between what AI search offers and what we actually need when searching.
Here’s the deal: When you search for something, you’re typically doing one of three things:
- Looking for a specific fact (“When was the company tax filing deadline?”)
- Researching a topic to form your own opinion (“Best CRM for small retail business”)
- Trying to find a specific resource (“Download 2025 tax form 1120-S”)
AI search engines are trying to replace all these with a single conversational answer. And that’s where things fall apart.
For factual queries, AI responses are often less reliable than traditional search results because they synthesize information without properly citing sources. They speak with confidence even when wrong, which is worse than simply pointing you to reliable sources.
For research queries, AI search engines try to form an opinion for you rather than presenting diverse viewpoints. They collapse the richness of human perspective into a bland, middle-of-the-road answer that avoids controversy at the cost of nuance.
And for resource-finding queries, AI search engines are actually worse than traditional search because they summarize information about resources instead of directly connecting you to them.
What’s particularly frustrating for small businesses is that AI search engines make it even harder for your website to be discovered. Instead of sending users to your site, they summarize your content and keep users on their platform. The search engine gets all the benefit while you get none of the traffic.
The article argues that we don’t need AI to rewrite the web – we need better tools to navigate it. That might mean better filtering options, more powerful advanced search features, or tools that help organize and make sense of traditional search results.
For small business owners, this means you shouldn’t dramatically change your SEO strategy for AI search just yet. Focus on creating genuinely helpful, detailed content that answers specific questions in your industry. That approach works regardless of how search evolves.
The real value of AI in search may ultimately be in helping us formulate better queries, not in replacing the results themselves. After all, asking the right question is often harder than finding the answer once you know what to ask.
