Google AI Overviews Surfaces 'Glue on Pizza' and 'Eat Rocks' Advice From Reddit

In mid-May 2024, shortly after Google rolled out AI Overviews (AI-generated summaries placed atop search results) broadly to US users, the feature began surfacing absurd and hazardous advice drawn from user-generated content. The most viral example advised adding about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to pizza sauce to keep cheese from sliding off; the suggestion was traced to a roughly 11-year-old joke comment by a Reddit user. Another Overview told users it was safe to eat 'at least one small rock per day,' a claim Google later traced to a 2021 satirical article from The Onion that had been republished on a geological software company's website. Further outputs reportedly produced other plainly false or unsafe 'tips.'

The failures were widely connected to Google's commercial relationship with Reddit. In February 2024, the same day Reddit publicly filed for its IPO, the company disclosed a content-licensing deal with Google reported at roughly $60 million per year, giving Google structured access to Reddit posts as AI training and grounding material. Reddit's total data-licensing revenue for 2024, across deals with Google, OpenAI and others, was later disclosed at around $203 million. Critics argued the fiasco exposed the core risk of treating unvetted forum content, including jokes and trolling, as a trustworthy source for answers presented with the authority of Google Search.

In a May 2024 blog post, Google's head of Search Liz Reid acknowledged that some answers were genuinely 'odd and erroneous,' while asserting that certain viral screenshots circulating online were fabricated. She explained the 'eat rocks' result surfaced in part because almost no serious web content addresses the nonsensical query, leaving the satirical source to fill the vacuum. Google said it had run extensive pre-launch testing but would implement more than a dozen technical fixes.

Those fixes included limiting the use of user-generated content such as Reddit in Overviews, restricting humor and satire sources, improving detection of nonsensical queries, and adding triggering restrictions for health-related searches. Google scaled back or removed some of the worst Overviews, and reporting in subsequent weeks indicated that some flawed outputs, including the glue-on-pizza suggestion, continued to surface intermittently.

The episode became the defining cautionary tale of the early AI-search era, encapsulating the tension between Reddit's value as a vast trove of human conversation and its unsuitability, unfiltered, as a factual authority.