Most people in the UK are now familiar with the AI-generated summaries that increasingly pop up on major search engines, but while questions continue to mount around the reliability of AI content, the general public is taking a less cautious approach.

That’s according to fresh research from YouGov, which found in a poll of more than 2,001 British adults that 52% considered these AI-generated results useful, compared to less than a third (32%) who did not.

Although Google’s Gemini tool, Microsoft’s Bing-AI, and the newer SearchGPT from OpenAI are among the most notable examples of these tools, their use extends to even smaller players, including Leo AI from Brave, the AI-powered Perplexity search engine, or even the Waldo search tool.

The horde of AI search tools widely available means they’re hard to miss, with YouGov finding that around 80% of the UK public have at least seen them in action, and more than half (53%) encountering them often.

Despite developers being open about the fact that their LLMs can make mistakes, and clearly warning that AI generated results shouldn’t be taken completely at face value, YouGov’s respondents were still more likely to find these results credible than not. 

Among all age groups, 42% said they consider AI summaries trustworthy, compared to 35% who do not.

Those aged between 18-34 and 35-54 were the most likely to think AI results could be trusted, at 47% each, with the average only brought down by those aged 55 and over, with just 29% considering AI summaries trustworthy.

According to YouGov, younger users were the most likely to say they found these overviews useful (61%), while those aged 55 or older were much less keen (37%), and when asked about whether these AI summaries are relevant to the queries, 58% said they were – although again, this increased among younger demographics (67%) and fell among older ones (39%).

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With such a clear split over the usefulness and credibility of AI search tools, the future of user demand is unclear at best.

Just 18% of those polled said they would like to see more AI in their search bars, while 33% want things to stay the same, and 38% of UK adults said they would prefer less AI content in their search results, suggesting that while the public might find these summaries useful at the moment, they might feel differently if they were returned with every query.

However, research from Gartner has predicted that by 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%, with searches lost to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.