Answer Bubbles: Information Exposure in AI-Mediated Search
TL;DR
Responses to real search queries are examined at three levels: source diversity, linguistic characterization of the generated summary, and source-summary fidelity, to find that generative search systems exhibit significant source-selection biases in their citations.
Abstract
Generative search systems are increasingly replacing link-based retrieval with AI-generated summaries, yet little is known about how these systems differ in sources, language, and fidelity to cited material. We examine responses to 11,000 real search queries across five systems---vanilla GPT, Search GPT, Perplexity Search with Grok, Google AI Overviews, and traditional Google Search---at three levels: source diversity, linguistic characterization of the generated summary, and source-summary fidelity. We find that generative search systems exhibit significant \textit{source-selection} biases in their citations, favoring certain sources over others. Incorporating search also selectively attenuates epistemic markers, reducing hedging by up to 60\% while preserving confidence language in the AI-generated summaries. At the same time, AI summaries further compound the citation biases: Wikipedia and longer sources are disproportionately overrepresented, whereas cited social media content and negatively framed sources are substantially underrepresented. Our findings highlight the potential for \textit{answer bubbles}, in which identical queries yield structurally different information realities across systems, with implications for user trust, source visibility, and the transparency of AI-mediated information access.
