Google Discover

Google Discover makes messy AI headlines a ‘feature’ because they ‘perform well’

Ben Schoon | Jan 23 2026 - 7:05 am PT

Following prior testing, Google Discover is keeping AI headlines around as they “perform well” with users.

Google Discover is the leftmost homescreen page on many Android devices, as well as filling the Google app’s homepage, and delivers content from around the web to fit your interests. While it’s easy to complain about clickbait through this panel, it’s undoubtedly good at finding content that you might be interested in, and in a fairly timely manner to boot. Google often runs experiments that change the design of Discover, and one of those tests is now graduating to a standard feature.

NewGeekGuide reported in mid-2025 that Google Discover was testing the use of AI to generate summaries of articles, and that extended to the headline of the article in late 2025. Examples shared during the test showed how this could go wrong, with one of our own articles about how Qi2 25W speeds don’t typically make a huge difference being titled “Qi2 slows older Pixels” by the AI which is simply false. The actual headline was “Don’t buy a Qi2 25W wireless charger hoping for faster speeds – just get the ‘slower’ one instead.”

Google buries a “Generated with AI, which can make mistakes” message under the “See more” button in the summary, making it look like this is the publisher’s intended headline.

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Despite the obvious issues, though, Google Discover is going all-in on these AI-generated headlines. Google told The Verge that AI headlines in Discover are no longer an “experiment,” but a “feature” of the experience. Why? Google says that the feature “performs well for user satisfaction.” Notably, some articles still see their standard headlines in use, while others have no headline at all as we spotted last year.

Google says:

We launched a new feature last year in Discover to help people explore topics that are covered by multiple creators and websites. The feature includes a helpful AI-powered overview of the topic, a featured image, and links to related stories. The overview headline reflects information across a range of sites, and is not a rewrite of an individual article headline. This feature performs well for user satisfaction, and we continue to experiment with the UI to help people click through and explore content on the web.

While it is obvious that Google has refined this feature over the past couple of months, it doesn’t take long to still find plenty of misleading headlines throughout Discover. Yesterday, we covered Waze informing users of “new” features rolling out that were announced nearly two years ago, but Google’s AI headline completely removed the nuance of that story. Another article from NotebookCheck about an Anker power bank with a retractable cable was given a headline that’s about another product entirely.

A pair of headlines from Tom’s Hardware and PCMag, meanwhile, show the two sides of using AI for this purpose. The Tom’s Hardware headline, “Free GPU & Amazon Scams,” isn’t representative of the actual article, which is about someone who bought a GPU from Amazon, canceled their order, and the retailer shipped it anyway. There’s nothing about “Amazon Scams” in the article. The PCMag headline, meanwhile, offers a concise, if somewhat messy summary of an article about Google Home’s offline light bug. That bug, as we reported on earlier this week, doesn’t have a fix available just yet, as the AI headline somewhat implies.