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Google’s AI Overviews Are Fooled by Iran-Related Visual Hoaxes in its Own Reverse-Image Searches

By Sofia Rubinson and Ines Chomnalez

What’s happening: Google’s reverse-image tool is producing inaccurate AI-generated summaries of fabricated and misleading visuals tied to the U.S.-Iran conflict, NewsGuard has found, exposing a significant weakness in a widely used system for verifying the authenticity of images.

Context: Google’s AI Overviews are automated summaries generated by its AI systems that appear across search results — including reverse-image searches — to provide users with an instant summary of the results. A reverse-image search allows users to upload an image to the Google search bar to learn where the image has previously appeared online.

• In addition to the AI Overview, Google provides a list in a tab to the right of the AI Overview of “Exact Matches” of the image, which can often provide insight into the image’s origins and provide clues about its authenticity.

In a July 2025 NewsGuard Academy video, NewsGuard explained how reverse-image tools such as Google’s can be used to trace the origins of visuals in order to assess their authenticity. However, NewsGuard has now found that AI-generated summaries produced by Google’s reverse-image search tool can...

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