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Does this headline even matter? Google Discover is writing its own with AI
- Google Discover will continue applying AI-generated headlines to “trending topic” stories after experimenting with the idea in late 2025.
- Many of these headlines are low quality, often misrepresenting the stories they’re applied to.
- Aggregated trending topic stories are presented very similarly to normal news stories, which may lead readers to blame publishers for misleading or confusing titles.
Been seeing bizarre, AI-generated headlines in Google Discover? That’s not an accident, Google says. Following an initial experiment last year, the company has confirmed that it plans to continue using AI to whip up titles for certain stories that appear in the Discover feed that lives on Android home screens, without input from the people who write those stories or much attention paid to whether the generated headlines make any sense.
As The Verge‘s Sean Hollister writes, Google has informed the publication that it will continue slapping AI-generated headlines on certain stories in Discover, a decision that, Google says, has been good for “user satisfaction.”
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Stories from individual publishers aren’t having their titles replaced, strictly speaking. The AI-generated titles are being applied to what Google calls “trending topics” — stories that have been covered by multiple outlets, with multiple human-authored headlines. Rather than choosing one of those handcrafted titles, Google’s AI tries to parse the details of the story from across publishers and wrap it all up in its own headline. AI being AI, this process often goes awry, resulting in generated titles that are awkward, confusing, or outright wrong.
These trending topics are presented very similarly to normal news items, feature visual assets pulled from whichever outlet gets top billing, and link to that outlet’s story. For an average user, the effect is that nonsensical headlines are showing up in Discover, linking to outlets that didn’t write or approve them.
You can distinguish these AI-titled stories in a couple of ways. At the top of the card for a trending topic, rather than a single outlet’s icon and name, you’ll see up to three icons with text reading something like Android Authority +11. Trending topics also lack the Follow button that cards for a single outlet’s work feature in the top right corner.
Tapping a trending topic’s Frankensteined AI title opens an AI-generated summary, and tapping the Outlet +X text at the top of the card takes you to a list of individual stories, complete with their intended headlines. But tapping the large featured image — which, again, is pulled from whichever outlet’s name appears first at the top of the card — takes you directly to that outlet’s content.
Ideally, Discover wouldn’t be summarizing the news using AI at all — the tech has repeatedly been shown to be unreliable when it comes to understanding and relaying news stories. Judging by Google’s statements to The Verge, though, this behavior has graduated from a small experiment to long-term feature; the company is committed to the bit for the foreseeable future. If you’re getting your news from Discover, be extra sure to watch out for AI-generated misinformation.
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