Time to switch to Bing? Searching for words like “disregard” or “ignore” breaks AI listings in Google Search

Google Search has problems with certain keywords
It seems that the AI overviews treat these words as commands
One of the words that cause problems for users is “disregard”

Just a few days ago, Google unveiled a slew of updates that will effectively turn its famous search engine into an AI bot interface, but it looks like there will be some bugs along the way: searches for words like “disregard” or “ignore” currently break the AI listings in Google Search.

As discovered by journalist Thomas Maxwell and others (via Android Police ), typing these words returns a bunch of blank space at the top of the screen, with the regular blue link search results appearing a little way down the page.

What’s missing is the AI summary that now appears at the top of most search results pages on Google. It seems the AI is getting confused and thinks these words are being issued as commands rather than search queries.

Our future for AI search

@mweinbach what’s up with google man pic.twitter.com/Cur1rAcHEp 22 May 2026

Google will no doubt fix this bug before too long, but it’s a reminder that AI can and will make mistakes – as Google will tell you every time you get a response inside the Gemini AI app (in very small text at the bottom of the screen).

You don’t have to look far online to find some pretty negative reactions to Google’s AI mistakes, and it seems that there are a significant number of users who would rather stick with the old way of searching the web without all the added AI.

For Google, however, this is the future. It knows its search business is at risk if people start using AI chatbots like ChatGPT to find all their information, so it wants to get ahead of the competition with its own AI offerings.

If you want to stick with the old way of surfing the web – and maybe give more support to authors and publishers along the way – then search engine alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Kagi are available, and there’s also always Bing. These portals have their own AI capabilities, but they are not quite as prominent as Google’s.