Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it
Whitehall content teams play whack-a-mole with zombie pages as Google hoovers up the lot
AI overviews from the likes of Google are serving up false summaries of UK government information by drawing on stale GOV.UK pages, according to content designers at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT).
The problem, senior content designer Giorgio Di Tunno and content operations lead Neil Starr wrote in a GOV.UK blog post, is that outdated pages no longer maintained are now being actively scraped to answer user queries.
A Google search for the cost of setting up a charity in the UK, for instance, returned an AI overview citing £13 online or £40 by post for Companies House incorporation - figures pulled from an unmaintained legacy page. The actual cost is £100 online or £124 by post.
When The Reg tried the same search, Google's AI overview first said incorporation was free, then a day later offered "roughly £13-£183+." Neither was accurate.
"The problem isn't that the government is trying to trip people up (it isn’t), but that inconsistent information surfaced by the AI overview feels that way to users," Di Tunno and Starr wrote. "That perception alone can undermine confidence in government services."
"In the past, most of those outdated, niche pages would fall into the 0-view abyss, never to be stumbled on again." Now, agentic search processes for generative AI summaries draw on these pages to answer specific queries.
To tackle this, DBT audited GOV.UK pages that hadn't been updated in five years, had fewer than 11 views in that period, were meant to carry current information, and had no active owner, including those published by the defunct Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It found 150 pages which have since been redirected to archived copies, current GOV.UK pages or relevant legislation.
The department is also testing six-monthly review cycles, with last and next review dates displayed at the bottom of each page. Tunno and Starr said this has gone down "extremely well with real users" as it helps them to trust the material.
AI summaries - which search engines often provide as their top results to user queries - are causing other problems for government content designers. The Department for Education’s head of design, Mark Edwards, recently warned these provide misleadingly narrow or incomplete answers to questions.
"We now need to design with the expectation that much of what we publish will be read indirectly, atomized, summarized or reinterpreted by systems we don't control," he wrote earlier this month. ®