Google AI Overviews: Prompt Injection Hits the Homepage of the Internet
When Google rolled AI Overviews into US search in May 2024, satirical sources got quoted as fact at national scale — glue on pizza, rocks as vitamins — and security researchers reframed the comedy as indirect prompt injection: retrieved content steering the answer in Google's own voice. This piece tracks the launch-week failures, the overview-bait SEO economy that followed, the manual-removal treadmill, provenance-aware retrieval as the real fix, and why RAG systems inherit the trust profile of their worst-cited source.