this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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LLMs and their precursors were always how search engines compiled and ranked their search results. Google has been using some form of AI to build up its base of information for decades.
The absurd turn of the last decade was Google C-level pivot from engagement through useful results to engagement through bad results that force you to click around on the site longer. "How do we get more ad interaction?" became the question that dominated the development of their technology.
That's what enahittified their website. Not "AI".
given that by LLMs, people generally refer to the transformer architecture, it definitely wasn't how google always did search. they famously started out by using pagerank. now, back then this was definitely seen as AI, but what gets called ai by the general public has changed over the last couple of decades. now people use it almost exclusively to refer to deep learning models or even just llms.
so yes, in a strict sense google has always used ai for search. but when the general public says AI now, they usually mean llms specifically and using that to replace actually going to the source websites is new
Pagerank was built on the Markov Model, which became the core of modern LLM graph design.
It was a precursor technology, not an independent system, which used Hyperlinks rather than word tokens to form associations.
So much of the complaint around AI isn't even the LLM part. It's the weighting and censorship of certain sources and data, convinced with the masking of results behind natural language output templates.
You had the first problem under Pagerank already (Google Bombing and "shadow banning" of sources the company didn't find reliable). The second is entirely a product of the interface and has nothing to do with the heuristics of the program.
sure both pagerank and llms can modelled as marlov chains, but the working and output of these models is very different. it's disingenuous to state that google used llms and their precursors since the beginning. their precursors maybe but they are very different beasts.
as for the complaints, for me a big problem of their use in search engines is that they often hide the sources of the summary they provide and disincentivize people from clicking through to the source sites. This is very much a new problem that didn't exist before google included output from generative models
Search is probably one of the few "ok" uses for LLMs if you find a way to reduce the carbon footprint and train on ethical material
Which, up until maybe eight or nine years ago, Google was pretty good at.
But then we went into this insane build-out cycle, where you were seemingly incentivized to be extra sloppy with every aspect of the business.