Altman said he thinks that maybe four years might be too long for others, too.
Altman shared other thoughts and advice, including why it's often a waste to try to be taken seriously.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said two years in college was "the exact right amount of time" for him. It may be for others, too.
"I think I learned a lot, and it would have been like vastly diminishing returns," Altman recently told investor Cory Levy during a surprise appearance at Internapalooza, Levy's networking summit for tech interns.
Altman said the four-year college experience may not be necessary in today's world.
"I've sort of thought that maybe the way the world has evolved, college just shouldn't be as long as it is, but it was still great to meet people and kind of like live on your own and get to work on projects," he said.
In 2005, the future OpenAI chief dropped out of Stanford after two years to cofound Loopt, an app that allowed users to share their location with friends. Loopt went on to be part of the first Y Combinator batch, which paved the way for Altman's eventual rise to running the famed startup incubator himself.
Altman said two more years of college "would have not been that great."
"So, I was very happy with how it went, but you don't get to run the experiment twice," he said. "I know a lot of people now who have not gone to college at all and done great."
Altman's views align with those of others in tech, most notably his mentor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who supports a fellowship that awards $250,000 to young people to skip college entirely or at least take a break from their studies.
Altman's career advice
The OpenAI chief had additional advice for those in the audience, including why it's often a waste for young entrepreneurs to try to be taken seriously.
"I think people put too much effort into trying to get taken seriously, and you can sort of get a long way in life and career just by doing stuff," Altman said. "And I think this is much more true now than ever before. You can make a whole startup kind of by yourself in a room with a lot of AI tokens, but not much else."
Altman said that in some cases, you may just need to add someone to your team.
"If you were trying to do enterprise sales to a big, stodgy, old company, then it kind of does," he said. "And after trying and failing to get taken seriously in that specific way for a while, I was like, 'I'm just going to hire a 50-year-old.'"
Asked about the time when he juggled OpenAI and his other duties, Altman said it's bad advice to tell people starting out to focus on just a single project.
"I think it's fine to work on multiple projects for a little while because you don't really know what's going to work," he said. "You don't really know what you're going to be interested in. You don't really know what's going to be a good fit. But then the mistake that people do make is as soon as you figure out what your highest conviction thing is, that is when you're supposed to do the painful work of getting free from the other stuff and going all in."
Dario Amodei is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic,
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Since Anthropic is still private, the vast majority of investors buy on secondary markets.
Anthropic's secondary valuation has soared to $1.5 trillion over the past month, a 25% increase.
Anthropic's valuation has continued to climb even as its competitors have been closing the gap.
Investors still can't get enough of Anthropic.
As the AI giant races towards what could be one of the largest IPOs in history, its shares are changing hands on secondary markets at valuations as high as $1.5 trillion, even as competition from OpenAI and Chinese open-source models intensifies.
Anthropic's private market valuation has recently soared to as much as $1.5 trillion, a 25% increase over the past month, according to three secondary traders who spoke with Business Insider. The catch is that shares are incredibly tough to get.
"The few sellers on our books are around $1.5 trillion," said Glen Anderson, CEO of Rainmaker Securities, a merchant bank focused on private securities transactions. "Even at that number, there aren't a lot of sellers out there."
Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in a funding round announced in May. In June, it filed paperwork to go public, with an expected public market debut in the next few months.
"People are trying to position themselves ahead of the IPO," said Adam Crawley, president of Augment, a marketplace to invest in private shares.
Since Anthropic is still private, the vast majority of investors buy on secondary markets, where existing stock is sold by employees or early investors. Some are legitimate, while others have involved suspect deals with high fees and byzantine ownership structures structured as SPVs, or special-purpose vehicles, which allow investors to pool their funds for a single, one-off deal.
Anthropic declined to comment for this story. On its website, it has become more explicit in cautioning against unauthorized stock sales and scams.
Some buyers have heeded the warnings and are being more choosy about which stock they buy, according to Aman Verjee, a general partner at Practical Venture Capital.
"Many buyers are now asking for direct cap table exposure," he said. "Demand for nested SPVs with indirect exposure, less reporting rights, or exposure to Anthropic's earlier rounds and common shares is softer, and I'm not seeing a lot of demand at $1.5 trillion for that, but there is some."
Soaring valuation even as competition increases
Anthropic's secondary valuation has continued to climb even as its competitors have been closing the gap.
Former interns from Google, Tinder, and AWS suggested making connections with other employees.
nd3000/Getty Images
Former interns from Google, AWS, and Tinder share their tips for securing full-time offers.
They suggested building connections at the company and raising your hand.
They also advised taking agency, showing curiosity, and keeping track of your wins.
It's almost the end of summer, which means interns everywhere are approaching the looming question they've probably been avoiding: Am I getting a return offer?
The job market may feel more chaotic and competitive than usual — and AI certainly adds a layer of uncertainty as it reshapes the workforce and changes what companies are looking for. However, when it comes to proving yourself early in your career, much of the advice hasn't changed.
We rounded up some of the best tips former interns from companies like Google and Tinder have shared with us over the last two years on how they turned their internships into full-time offers. Their paths were different, but the same four lessons kept coming up.
Show eagerness to learn
In addition to taking initiative, interns should prioritize asking questions and show an eagerness to learn. Curiosity remains a key trait that executives look for in employees moving up the ladder.
Victoria Rozanska said she was curious about others and their work.
Victoria Rozanska
Victoria Rozanska, a former Google intern, recently told Business Insider that embracing continuous learning was critical to her success. She said being open to feedback is "key to thriving."
Ryan Stewart, who interned at Tinder before eventually becoming a full-time brand manager,said in July that he was initially nervous about approaching senior leaders, but found that leading with curiosity made people receptive.
Ryan Stewart said he led with curiosity when trying to connect with leaders at Tinder.
Tinder
"If you're seen as being curious, there's no wrongdoing there, and I think you can go for it," Stewart said.
Asking questions is also a key part of learning how to do the job.
Kevin Gutierrez, a recent graduate of Columbia University, who interned at AWS and was later offered a full-time position, told Business Insider thatwhen interns are given a project, it's their responsibility to gain a deep understanding of it. He said if you have a solid grasp on what's going on, it makes the work easier.
Build relationships
Former interns from both Google and Tinder had a similar piece of advice: build relationships whenever you get the chance.
Nancy Qi said she had lunch with her colleagues every day.
Nancy Qi
Nancy Qi, a former Google intern who spent three summers at the tech giant before receiving a full-time offer, told Business Insider in 2024 that she ate lunch with her colleagues every day, and that helped create "team chemistry." Those relationships also made her more excited to come to work and motivated her on the job.
Interns should also strive to make connections beyond their immediate teammates.
Tinder's Stewart said that he scheduled one-on-one meetings with senior directors to learn more about the business.
Even if you don't ultimately stay at the company, those connections can make an internship feel less intimidating and leave you with a stronger network when you graduate.
"It's good to build up a good network of successful people, and it's just good to network with people that are farther along the career path than you," Tawfiq Mohammad, a former Google intern,saidlast year.
Take initiative
It can be intimidating to speak up when you're one of the least experienced people in the room, but that's all the more reason to use your voice whenever you have the chance. Taylor Wong, a former Tinder intern, said her Gen Z perspective became an asset because colleagues actively wanted to hear from someone in that demographic.
"When you are the Gen Z person in the room, everyone wants your opinion," Wong said in July, adding that other interns should "lean into that superpower."
Taylor Wong interned at Tinder.
Tinder
Interns should take advantage of opportunities to show agency in projects they're assigned.
"You're going to be given a project that summer and try to own that project," Mohammad said about interning at Google. "Try to own it from A to Z."
Eric Brandon Kam, who received an offer at Tinder after his internship, said that for him, that meant speaking up and sharing his perspective on the projects he was assigned.
Eric Brandon Kam is a backend engineer at Tinder.
Eric Brandon Kam
"Instead of just implementing tickets, I gave my own perspective on how we could better engineer a project to prioritize both user outcome and long-term code health," Kam said in July.
Keep track of your work — and your wins
Eventually, every intern has the inevitable conversation about whether they're getting a return offer, but the prep should start before.
Lydia Lam, who completed three Google internships before joining the company full time, recommended "producing a lot of artifacts." She said in 2025 that designs, projects, or other tangible work can demonstrate your skills and impact.
Lydia Lam interned at Google.
Lydia Lam
Qi took a similar approach to documenting her work. At the end of every week, she wrote down notes about what she was stuck on and what she accomplished. When she filled out the reflection at the end of the summer, she included screenshots and links to those weekly summaries. She said it showed effort and allowed the person reviewing her work to see her problem-solving process and how she approached each issue.
Stewart went a step further. He said he spent his internship identifying gaps in the business and pitched his own full-time role at the end of it. He approached the conversation knowing the worst answer was "no," and since his internship was already ending, he figured he had nothing to lose by asking.
South Korea's stock markets have been on a wild ride this year.
Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images
South Korea's Kospi has surged 22% from its July low, roaring back into a technical bull market.
Chip giants Samsung and SK Hynix are powering the rebound after driving much of July's brutal rout.
Macquarie sees more upside as booming AI demand fuels a memory-chip crunch benefiting the two giants.
South Korean stocks are back in a technical bull market, just two weeks after a brutal selloff.
On Thursday, South Korea's benchmark Kospi closed 4% higher, leaving it 22% above its July 30 closing low and meeting the widely used definition of a technical bull market.
The turnaround has been swift. The Kospi index plunged about 40% from its June 22 peak to its July 30 trough, as a selloff in index heavyweights Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix amplified losses.
On Thursday, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix closed 5% and 6% higher, respectively, as optimism over AI-driven memory demand lifted chip stocks.
Analysts at Macquarie Capital said July's steep losses — when Kospi plunged 22% — appeared to be driven more by investor positioning and fund flows than a deterioration in fundamentals.
Foreign and institutional selling has stabilized since late July, while margin financing remains at reasonable levels, the bank's analysts wrote in a note on Friday.
"The volatility is over," they wrote.
Being in a technical bull market doesn't mean the Kospi's rally will continue. But August has been calmer so far, with the benchmark index up 3.3% month to date.
Samsung and SK Hynix drove much of July's rout, accounting for 71% of the Kospi's losses. Together, they fell 48%, compared with 26% for the rest of the market, according to Macquarie's analysis.
Macquarie's analysts expect Samsung and SK Hynix to lead the near-term rebound, supported by surging AI-driven demand for memory chips.
"We are facing the worst memory crunch in history and see no signs of supply constraints easing within the next three years," Macquarie said.
Macquarie said AI inference-driven demand is "off the charts," requiring huge amounts of memory even as supply remains constrained and slow to respond.
Macquarie has an year-end target of 8,000 for the Kospi, implying about 17% upside from its current level of 6,813.34.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish the July consumer price index report at 8:30 a.m. ET. Inflation slipped to 3.5% in June, the lowest rate since March and cooler than the expected 3.8%. The consensus forecast for July is a modest cooling down to 3.4%.
"Forces eroding inflation include rising rental vacancy rates that are restraining rent growth, a less onerous tariff regime than a year ago and moderating wage gains," David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, said in commentary. "However, the pace at which inflation declines depends on how long it takes to return to normal traffic through the Strait of Hormuz."
A key comparison to watch is whether inflation outpaced wage growth for the fourth straight month. Wage growth slowed to 3.2% over the year in July, the lowest increase since 2021.
"Even if you're making more money numbers-wise, with the way prices are rising, you have less money left over at the end of the month," ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud told Business Insider. "That's really going to impact the large consumer base of America, middle- and low-income households, who are really dependent on wage growth to help them remain economically viable."
Energy is one big category to watch in today's report as the Iran war and its effects on the oil market continue. Growth in the energy price index cooled to a year-over-year rate of 15.7% in June from a 23.5% peak in May.
The new price data comes after Friday's dismal jobs report, which showed the US shed jobs in July. Downward revisions showed around 100,000 fewer jobs were created over the previous two months than was previously reported. Unemployment and overall labor force participation dropped, while prime-age labor force participation ticked up.
Cory Stahle, senior economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said several data sources showing anemic wage growth and weak hiring together indicate that employers aren't "necessarily pulling out the stops to try to attract workers" because there isn't pressure to do so. He added that companies may be prioritizing health benefits over wage increases.
There will be another CPI report out before the Federal Open Market Committee meets in mid-September to determine what to do next with interest rates. On Tuesday afternoon, CME FedWatch showed about a 50-50 chance of a hike or unchanged rates, based on interest rate traders' expectations.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Kirk Gafill, an owner and general manager of Nepenthe, said the restaurant is losing thousands in sales while under an evacuation order due to the Timber Fire.
Kirk Gafill
Kirk Gafill runs Nepenthe, an iconic Big Sur restaurant under evacuation due to the Timber Fire.
He said Nepenthe faces up to $70,000 in lost sales each day it's closed during peak season.
Gafill said the impact on Nepenthe and its employees will depend on how long the fire lasts.
This is an as-told-essay based on a conversation with Kirk Gafill, an owner and general manager of Nepenthe, a restaurant on California's Big Sur coast that is under an evacuation order due to the Timber Fire. Gafill is also the president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I live on property at Nepenthe, but when I first became aware of the fire on Saturday, my wife and I were at our home in Monterey Bay, where we often spend weekends. Every fire makes you sit up and pay attention, but I was hoping it wouldn't be very impactful and that it might take care of itself.
By mid-morning Sunday, I went down to Nepenthe. We had very good visibility and could see that the fire was pretty active, and the air attack, or planes fighting the fire. It was very dramatic. When a tree goes up, it's like a Roman candle. We could see it was expanding. When the evacuation orders started coming on Sunday evening, we began to treat it as a full-blown threat.
We have workforce housing with about 30 units, so when the mandatory evacuation came in, we communicated with our staff, and most of them relocated temporarily. Myself, my son, and a small handful of employees have stayed on the property or have been driving in, providing facility security and maintenance, and continuing preparation in the event the fire takes a turn for the worse and comes closer to us.
This is our peak period. Every day we're not open this time of year is a $65,000 to $70,000 loss in sales. We are in a wait-and-see mode and evaluating when conditions will improve to the point we can reopen for guest service.
Nepenthe, located on a cliffside on the Big Sur coast, has been under an evacuation order due to the Timber Fire.
Nepenthe
In this situation, information is the gold standard. The first thing you want to know is how threatened you are. Official information, particularly in the first 72 to 96 hours, is often extremely delayed, incomplete, or inconsistent. It's like the fog of war. It just takes time.
We prepare year-round for fires, but there's always more to do
We're in a heavily forested area and have been through a lot of fires. We can go a decade or more without a significant fire, and then you can have two or three years of them in a row. We know it's a when, not an if. We just don't know when the "when" will be.
We do year-round fire prevention and mitigation work. But you always find something that you haven't done as well as you could have. We've been reevaluating where grasses may have grown up in our defensible space, checking to make sure we don't have leaf litter building up in any of our eaves or gutters, and examining all of our structures to ensure there aren't flammables stacked up against the walls or nearby.
We have fire hydrants around the property, so we're also making sure they have wrenches so if someone needs to attach a fire hose and use it, the wrench is there to open and close the hydrant.
Nepenthe has been closed while the evacuation order has been in place.
Nepenthe
If the fire becomes too intense or puts any of our staff at risk, we'll have to walk away. To the extent we can safely do so, we're trying to be here to complement and support the efforts of fire services.
As a restaurant, we're also running up against a significant amount of perishable food that we want to find a home for before it spoils. Even though we're not open to the public, our chef is triaging our food stock to provide to food banks or to create meals on the fly for first responders.
You try to make the best use of the time, not be caught up in the anxiety of it all, and also manage your own mental and physical health and get enough rest. That's always tough in the first 48 hours. You also have to continue to reevaluate your risk management. How long is it safe to be in an area that's deemed to be so dangerous that you're under mandatory evacuation?
The longer this lasts, the worse it is for the business and our employees
Every day we are unable to open is a huge loss of income for employees and the business itself.
We are doing what we can to ensure we can reopen effectively and resume guest service at the earliest opportunity.
We're in this constant balancing act of how do we deal with our perishables? How do we handle our staffing commitments and be ready to open tomorrow if the evacuation order is lifted?
Gafill said he and a few other employees are still on site at the restaurant and waiting to see how the fire spreads.
Nepenthe
The bigger impact will depend on whether our business insurance, which should kick in after the first 48 hours and last up to 28 days, covers the losses. This event would seem to meet the necessary stipulations, but with insurance, you never really know. If that insurance is not applicable, it will have a severe economic impact, the severity of which depends on how long this lasts.
We've got Highway 1 as something of a firebreak, so right now we're not nearly as at risk as a number of other locations, but even if a fire doesn't impact us directly, there are indirect impacts. On Tuesday, part of the highway closed. That effectively shuts down our guest operations. We're keeping our fingers crossed that this will be measured in days, not anything longer.
One thing we feel confident about is that once highway access is restored and we're no longer dealing with evacuation considerations, business levels will rebound very quickly.
Big Sur is still stunningly beautiful, even with the fire slopes. In the early days, you can't help but see the black, charred slope contrasted against the unburned, green vegetation. But this is a very suitable landscape for quick recovery from fire. The slopes will regrow to the point where two months from now we'll have visitors saying, "I heard there was a fire. Where was it?"
Gafill said the impact on the restaurant will depend on how long the fire or highway closure lasts.
Nepenthe
As you get closer and closer to the point where you're making really hard decisions, your anxiety gets pretty high. You just try to keep calm, make the best decision you can, and make sure whatever decision you make doesn't imperil somebody else.
Do you get scared? Hell yes. Are you questioning yourself? Absolutely.
And if you have to make the hard decision one way or the other, try to err on the side of safety. You can always come back and rebuild if you have to. You don't want to endanger yourself or someone else.
Damian Mansell was stunned to see what Google was saying about his nascent business. When he searched for reviews of The Plastics Shed — the online building-plastics supplier he incorporated at the start of 2025 — the platform's AI overview said customer feedback was "overwhelmingly negative." It listed complaints about delayed deliveries, lying staff, and damaged products. While the company had some positive feedback, the summary said, its poor customer service was a "significant recurring issue." The good news: The reviews weren't actually about Mansell's company. They appeared to be for competitors and companies that sold actual plastic sheds. The bad news: He had no idea what to do about it.
Mansell, who lives in the UK, says. "I can see how that happens, but why should it happen with Google?" Mansell, who lives in the UK. "I mean, obviously, the forefront of AI technology."
To make matters worse, Mansell was paying Google about £700 a month to advertise, while the summaries warned people away. Following advice he found on online forums, he repeatedly submitted feedback to Google that the abstract was wrong. After a couple of weeks, it started to improve. AI has been an invaluable tool for him to build out his business, so he doesn't want to malign the tech in general, but he wishes there were more accountability when things go awry.
"AI gives the common man the knowledge, but it can also ruin the common man," he says.
Google's AI Overviews are rapidly becoming consumers' first impression of businesses. Instead of scanning reviews and websites, many users see a single synopsis that purports to blend information from across the internet into a comprehensive digest. When those summaries are inaccurate, misleading, or jumbled, business owners say they can cause serious reputational damage and financial losses, and there's often little recourse.
Mansell still wonders how much business the issue cost him. He's tried to get Google to refund some of his ad dollars, but he hasn't had any luck, despite his best efforts.
"I'm like a dog with a bone," he says. "But I met my match with Google."
Internet search has changed drastically in the last few years: Instead of a list of links, Google often provides a single response that's supposed to summarize the constellation of online information. These overviews look right and sound confident, but they draw on a litany of sources with varying levels of reliability. They can even spit out information that is flat-out wrong. (Like recommending people make glue pizza.) Misinformation on the internet isn't new, but the clean, concise, AI-concocted package is.
"With the traditional search engine, the user sees multiple things. So if one of them has something wrong, chances are something else would counterbalance it," says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School. That's now gone, and with AI overviews, you're getting "The Answer," which may or may not be correct.
I look at the AI overview, I wouldn't call me.
For business owners, the consequences can be more than a mild annoyance or temporary confusion. These AI summaries are becoming their digital storefronts. Across the internet, you can find entrepreneurs and managers grumbling that AI summaries mix them up with other companies, surface complaints that are directed at someone else, or dole out false facts.
Earlier this year, Betty Whitney started noticing that Google's overviews were conflating her company — NW Select Property Management in Idaho — with similarly named businesses. The top panel seemed to be merging her firm with one in the region that closed years ago and mixing her reviews up with property managers in other states.
"If I'm a customer, and I'm looking for a property management company, and I look at the AI overview, I wouldn't call me," she says.
Whitney has spent months trying to amend the situation. Like Mansell, she's used Google's feedback mechanism to give overviews a "thumbs down" when they're wrong, and she's made some adjustments to her website to try to feed the AI crawlers more accurate data. After bringing her problem to a Google support forum, she got in touch with a third-party SEO expert who was able to help her out — sort of. The overview has gotten better, but it still periodically reverts to the mistake-filled version.
Three years after relocating, Philippa Main, a real estate agent in Northern Virginia, still can't completely convince Google that she's no longer in Florida. When she searches her name, most of the information that comes up about her is correct, but then there's a line that confidently states that she's been "servicing the Tampa Bay area since 2014," even though it sits right above her Virginia address. Main's tried everything she could think of to get it adjusted, combing the internet to try to find where the AI is drawing from, emailing Google, and asking friends to report the issue.
"There's so much competition in my industry that if any single thing seems off, someone's just going to call the next person on the list," she says. It's especially frustrating for small businesses, because "we're just trying to do everything that we can to compete with these massive companies who actually do have direct lines to Google or their representatives," she says. "Google just doesn't seem to care."
In a statement, a Google spokesperson told me that its search-related AI experiences are "rooted in our quality ranking systems and are designed to present a range of perspectives" from all over the internet. "AI Overviews are responsive to people's specific queries; for example, if someone specifically searches for complaints about a business, the generated response will likely show relevant information from sources across the web," they said.
It's no secret that AI is not always a bastion of truth — almost everyone who's used the technology has experienced a response from it that's highly off-base at some point. As the New York Times wrote in April, Google processes over five trillion searches a year, and even if its overviews are right nine times out of 10, that still means half a trillion wrongs. Google acknowledges that while the overwhelming majority of its overviews are accurate, there can be cases where they miss context or misinterpret content. A Google spokesperson said the study the Times cited has "serious holes."
Google's summaries synthesize information from many places — a big source is, obviously, the company website, but it also gobbles up Reddit posts, 10-year-old blogs, and Yelp reviews. The platform provides links that are supposed to back up its claims, but those links don't always support the output. AI has also been known to hallucinate, meaning it invents plausible-sounding things from thin air.
"There's so much room for error," says Lily Ray, an SEO and AI search consultant and the founder of Algorythmic, a consultancy.
The overviews are delivered with such assurance that people don't realize they're looking at an extracted or generated answer that may be incomplete or incorrect. Instead of clicking on five links to compare information or just spending a few minutes confirming, they skim the automated summary and call it a day. The AI says this roofing company's reviews are terrible? Onto the next one! Rarely do people dig in to check if it's pulling complaints for a business in another state.
There's so much room for error.
Search industry professionals say this is a new frontier for businesses. They no longer have to focus so heavily on search rankings but must instead manage the AI's interpretation of their reputations. It's not about chasing clicks —it's about making sure AI knows you exist and is nice and correct about you. Ray says it's the "biggest change to search" she's seen in her 16-year career.
This brave new world presents all sorts of nuances and complications. Google likes to cite Reddit a lot, which "can go awry very fast," Ray says. Reddit has a lot of good information, but it can also be a little wild. The same goes for YouTube comments, which the AI also seems to like. Some brands suffer from an information void: there's not a lot of content out there about them, so AI tries to fill in the gaps or comes up with bad answers. Or, they've got a name problem where they're too close to another entity, and the model can't tell who's who. There may be bad actors who intentionally leave false or negative information about businesses online for AI summaries to pick up. Even simple facts, such as store hours or phone numbers, require a concerted effort across the entire internet to keep straight. "There's so much maintenance work that has to go into keeping a brand's content and information accurate and up to date," Ray says.
Michael King, the founder and CEO of iPullRank, a digital marketing agency, tells me he focuses on citation accuracy and on gaining some influence over AI outputs. "The way these systems work is they're basically doing a bunch of searches in the background, and then they're feeding content to the large language model," King says. Businesses need to create more "surface area" — meaning publishing more content and targeting more keywords — to help AI find the right answer. He encourages clients to position themselves as the experts on their own brands.
"You've got to think of it as more like a reputation management campaign than your classic SEO campaign," King says. "It's just far more multidimensional."
Ben Fisher does this for a living and still runs into problems. He noticed that Google's AI summary was warning that his company — Steady Demand, a SEO and social media consultancy for small businesses — was a scam. After doing some digging, he realized it was referring to an old Reddit thread about a similarly named app and had to take some time out to "train" Google to know the difference.
"The big problem is there's nobody to contact. The other big problem is you search once, and you're done," Fisher says. Large language models don't produce the same results every time, even for the same questions, so people don't realize one result might not match the next month, week, or minute. "It's still a situation where you should be monitoring things on a regular basis," he says. "Otherwise, you're just not going to know why you're not getting calls."
This is a difficult issue to tackle from a technological, entrepreneurial, and regulatory point of view. LLMs are improving, but they're never going to be perfect. Business owners can do their best to keep an eye on how they're showing up in search results, but they've also got 9,000 other things to do.
Reasonable minds — and different countries and legal systems — can disagree about how responsible Google should be when the robot screws up. In Canada, a musician has filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against Google claiming that its AI summary falsely identified him as a sex offender. A court in Germany recently made a preliminary ruling that Google is liable for false statements made in its AI overviews. A Google spokesperson said that the German case focuses on "specific and narrow errors," not the way overviews display content, and that the company disagrees with the ruling and plans to appeal. Shah says that in the US, we have "very little consumer protection" for these types of issues.
"I don't think lawmakers even fully understand the technology enough and the implications to be able to do anything," he says.
In the meantime, business owners are left white-knuckling it, hoping that the mysterious technology at the heart of those AI summaries looks kindly upon them. That's the case with Mansell, who's proud to say that Google's overview of the Plastics Shed is now "fantastic", just like many of his actual reviews.
"It does worry me with regard to what can be said about you without any recourse," he says.
Despite his frustrations with the summary and failed attempts to get a refund, Mansell still pays to advertise with Google — otherwise, people don't click through to his website. "I just gave up," he says. "It was just an absolute pointless exercise."
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
