We asked Google AI about big tobacco. Its answer was missing some controversial history

Philip Morris International is a company with a controversial history.

The tobacco giant has been accused of aggressively marketing addictive, cancer-causing cigarettes and fuelling smoking-related deaths and diseases around the world.

But when a colleague doing some research recently put the company into Google for a search, the result they received surprised them.

Their search produced a summary from Google's AI overview, a feature that generates "a snapshot of key information about a topic or question" at the top of some Google search results.

The AI overview summaries often include links back to source material, and this one drew heavily from sources published by the company itself.

And the Philip Morris AI overview produced by Google on this occasion was pretty upbeat.

Philip Morris International (PMI) was "a leading international tobacco company working to transition from cigarettes to smoke-free products," the AI summary said, citing Philip Morris International's website.

"The company is focused on a 'future without cigarettes' and is actively involved in reducing post-consumer waste (filter cleanup), and improving sustainability within its supply chain," it read.

University of Sydney public health professor Becky Freeman said she was shocked to read an AI overview that was, in her view, "essentially a regurgitation of Philip Morris International's PR materials", with no mention of negative press around the company.

Missing links misleading, according to expert

Professor Freeman is not a neutral observer. Her research examines how the tobacco industry continues to promote its products, despite known harms and advertising restrictions.

She said Google's AI overview for Philip Morris parroted marketing strategies employed across the tobacco industries, where companies try to "make it seem like their bad behaviours are in the past", while continuing to profit from the sale of cigarettes.

"I consider this to be incredibly misleading," she said, after examining example AI summaries provided by the ABC and conducting her own search.

The ABC's initial AI overview results did not mention any broader context around the company's history or links to tobacco-related harms.

"It gives the impression this is just an everyday, run-of-the-mill company that is doing its best to run sustainably, and that engages in regular business practices," Professor Freeman said.

Alongside other big tobacco brands, PMI's former parent company (Altria) and US associate (Philip Morris USA) were found by a US court to have misled the public about the health risks of smoking over decades, despite internal research dating back to the 1980s that proved Philip Morris knew there were harms.

More recently, PMI has rapidly invested in other addictive products like vapes and its Zyn-branded nicotine pouches.

The proliferation of these products is understood have contributed to rising rates of nicotine use and addiction in young people, slowing generations of progress at reducing smoking harms.

What about other companies?

Philip Morris was just one example. The ABC searched Google for business names or neutral questions (i.e. "what" or "who" is British American Tobacco) with a focus on companies with complex histories.

Some of Google's AI overviews were drawn from a mixed range of sources, including news websites, that provided a more diverse selection of information.

What was apparent was that when AI overviews sourced information directly from the company's own websites, it was more likely to adopt a promotional tone.

British American Tobacco, for example, was continuing to focus on developing its "A Better Tomorrow" strategy to reduce harms, one AI overview read, linking back to the company's own website.

James Hardie, formerly Australia's largest manufacturer and distributor of asbestos products, was summarised as a "global leader" and originally Australian business that "pioneered asbestos-free fibre cement" in an AI overview that linked heavily back to the company's own website.

It did not mention that asbestos products still contribute to the deaths of thousands of Australians annually, or that the country has one of the highest rates of mesothelioma, a type of cancer caused by asbestos, in the world.

Businesses race to show up in AI search results

Google does not allow companies to pay to directly tweak how information about their brand is provided in AI overviews.

Its AI overviews come with a disclaimer that they "may sometimes provide inaccurate content".

But now that AI-powered search is changing the way people access information, researchers and industry experts say companies are racing to optimise their own websites to ensure AI uses them as the source for information in order to secure a more favourable write-up or future business traffic.

The ABC asked Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and James Hardie if they had used these strategies, which are known under various acronyms including generative engine optimisation (GEO), answer engine optimisation (AEO) or AI search engine optimisation (AI SEO).

None responded to the ABC's questions.

AI search results can change constantly

To be clear: trying to examine AI search summaries like this is not very scientific.

AI answers can change even when they are fed the exact search term or question, and that's true for Google's AI overviews or any AI large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini.

Founder of Melbourne online marketing agency StudioHawk, Harry Sanders, told the ABC this was because of the way LLMs work by directing "fan-out queries" when a user asks for information.

"That's basically a very complex, fancy, smart-sounding way of saying a bunch of different Google searches," as the model "tries to understand what the user's intent is," Mr Sanders explained.

The user then receives a summary, which in the case of Google is typically drawn from high-traffic websites, including news articles.

The fan-out queries and generated results could change, based on the wording of the question, what's happening in the news, who was searching, or at what point in time they searched, Mr Sanders said.

It is possible, for instance, that the publication of this article could alter some of the AI overview results in examples we looked at when writing it.

After the ABC contacted Google and used the Philip Morris AI overview as an example, we subsequently received AI overview results from the same query that acknowledged the company's controversial practices, with one including this italicised note:

"Note: Philip Morris International is often classified as a 'Big Tobacco' company and has faced criticism regarding its marketing tactics in various regions," it read, linking to Wikipedia.

Google says that change was not a result of the ABC's inquiry.

"The content and links that are included in AI Overviews are dynamic and change based on the information that is most relevant, helpful, and timely for a given search," a Google spokesperson said.

AI is shifting web traffic

The practice of businesses, or news publishers like the ABC, designing websites so their online content comes up in search results (known as search engine optimisation or SEO), has been around for a long time.

Now companies are under pressure to ensure they appear in AI results too.

Eye-tracking research shows search users are engaging significantly with AI overview content, while web publishers, businesses and news outlets have reported significant declines in traffic as fewer people click through links.

Limited pre-print research has also indicated the way information is presented in AI-search overviews might be capable of shifting people's attitudes.

Mr Sanders said he had been surprised by the data from his own business, which showed those referred by AI were more likely to become customers than those flowing from a personal recommendation.

AI research trying to catch up

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researcher Ashwin Nagappa said businesses could structure websites in a "neat" or "explainer" kind of way to help AI ingest information and increase the chance it serves it back to users in search.

But he said larger businesses with more high-traffic websites or more money to invest on AI advice might then have a better shot at getting mentioned in AI-search results.

For example, Dr Nagappa said the Philip Morris AI overview likely linked back to the company's own website as it was ranked highest in search and was "authoritative as the company itself".

Dr Nagappa and his QUT colleague Kateryna Kasianenko have been researching the influence of search engines and AI overviews as part of the Australian Search Experience 2.0 project.

There are still a lot of unknowns in this space. How people use (and trust) AI is shifting, as are the LLMs themselves. The research is trying to catch up.

Dr Kasianenko said the team's recent unpublished research, which examined searches for conspiracy theories, found AI overviews tended to give "prominence to commercial sources".

She said it was unclear whether that was only the case on that topic or part of a wider phenomenon.

"There is a chance Google may be prioritising commercial information producers and that might be partly because they do want to maintain their standing as someone who helps … give eyeballs to commercial content," Dr Kasianenko said.

She also pointed out many commercial sources were not misleading.

Google said it did not prioritise commercial sources in AI overviews, but drew from the sources that were deemed the most reliable and helpful depending on the exact search query.

Google has previously confirmed it has guardrails in place for certain topics, like health and hard news, where it aims not to show users AI overviews.

Dr Nagappa said users should exercise caution when using AI and consider why AI might be serving the information that they see — because there are really no rules right now.

"There is no policy or regulation that says to Google that you need to be careful about or how to present certain kind of data," he said.