You might have heard that AI search is not without its somewhat comical stumbling blocks. The summaries Google’s new AI Overviews spit out are often wrong, sometimes laughably so. That’s because while AI can scan, synthesize, and summarize, it’s kind of like a toddler who doesn’t understand context. Once you grok this, it makes sense that a robot might think glue is a smart way to keep toppings from sliding off a pizza. Glue is sticky!
The other issue is what earned this new tech a spot on a climate site. AI is a notorious power hog, potentially much more so than the Google searches of yore—if yore is allowed to mean “four months ago.” How much more is an open question. By some widely circulated estimates, generating this type of answer to a search query hoovers up about 10 times the energy as serving up conventional results; others say it could be closer to 30x. And with more energy consumption comes more emissions. In Google’s case, that AI ping is baked right in. If you’re using Google Search on the company’s Chrome browser (that’s around 66% of web users), the AI runs automatically. And, no, you can’t turn it off.
According to Google’s latest sustainability report, its net emissions in 2023 were up about 13% year over year, when they were supposed to be on track for a massive reduction. A push into AI is the culprit. While the company says it sources 64% of its energy from “carbon-free” sources—like wind and solar plus whatever else falls under “carbon-free”—the rest almost certainly come from burning fossil fuels. AI also requires ginormous data centers to run, which means the built environment costs of leaning into the tech are also sizable.
What does this mean for the planet-warming potential of using Google to answer our most mundane queries? At the company’s last earnings call CEO Sundar Pichai said the energy costs of AI are down 80% since the features were first introduced in early iterations in the company’s Labs, which is like a beta testing environment for power users.
This is where the math gets really muddy, because 1) we don’t know what date in the past he’s referring to, and 2) percentages are relative. 🤓 Google hasn’t said anything publicly about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with an individual search since 2009, and since then analysts have crunched other (often higher) estimates for the energy consumption of a single query. Fifteen years may as well be 150 considering how quickly companies iterate and improve on things like processors and energy efficiency. Google, for instance, says its data centers are 1.8 times as efficient as typical ones, and its latest AI processor, Trillium, is 67% more efficient than its predecessor. Yup, more percentages.
Because of all this, when you do the calculations and compare them with Google’s latest sustainability report, the math doesn’t math. If we were to crunch the emissions numbers on the trillions of searches that happen every year based on 2009 data, and assume that a search with AI uses 10x that, what rolling out AI Overviews to all queries would do to Google’s search-related emissions seems like lunacy. Even if we assume only half of queries trigger an AI-generated response, or if we slash energy usage by Trillium’s 67%, the numbers are still huge. If we start the calculations with a third-party estimate, things go completely bananas.
Being that we’re neither toddlers nor an AI, we knew this would be an illogical (🖖) conclusion. Google’s latest reporting, though, only shows aggregates across the entire business, which means no specific emissions estimates for web searches. When we reached out to Google about this, a spokesperson told us that they understand that this level of detail is important and that they review their reporting process each year.
So no emissions math—for now.* But while the question remains open, we have to assume that AI searches come with an emissions penalty, and it could be significant. Fortunately, there are things we can do to avoid unwittingly ballooning the footprint of our browsing and querying habits.
Use a different browser
AI Overviews only appear in Google Chrome. So switching to Safari, Firefox, or Microsoft’s Edge as your primary browser will steer you away from robot-generated responses to your Google searches. The benefit to this approach is that you still get Google’s other handy features like FAQs, Google Flights, and Google News. Here’s how to change your computer or phone’s default browser.
Change Chrome’s default search engine
Chrome dominates the browser wars for a range of reasons, including its speed, vast menu of extensions, and the fact that it plays nicely with developers. For a lot of folks, ditching it is untenable. In that case, the best thing to do is switch your default search engine to something other than Google. DuckDuckGo, in particular, does a nice job of emulating the add-on features you see in a classic Google Search. Here’s how to swap out your default search engine in Chrome.
*We’re continuing to pepper our contacts at Google with an array of follow-up questions, so we hope to have more concrete data at some point. Keep an eye out for a follow-up.