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Google Support Pages Start Defaulting to AI Chatbots 54

Posted by BeauHD from the AI-all-the-things dept.
Google is beginning to replace traditional support articles with "Ask Google Help," a Gemini-powered interface that summarizes documentation and lets users troubleshoot through a chatbot. 9to5Google reports: "Ask Google Help" will display a condensed version of the support article with direct troubleshooting steps, with the user then able to type in queries to have Gemini help figure out the next step forward. A "View Sources" button at the bottom of the AI response allows users to still access the original article, but direct links to any of these articles now defaults to the AI experience.

An example can be seen below on the "Secure a hacked or compromised Google account" page that Google's own support account directed users to within the past few days. It can also be seen on the "Fix common issues with 2-Step Verification" page and, as far as we can tell, any support pages on the Google Account Help forum.

Google, as of right now, appears to only be testing this on select support topics. The Google Pixel Help section, for instance, still defaults to articles, whereas the Google Chrome topic has also moved to the new experience. Beyond support pages alone, this new design also impacts the central hub, with links to topics no longer showing by default in exchange for an AI chatbot that helps you find the relevant page.
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Google Support Pages Start Defaulting to AI Chatbots More

Google Support Pages Start Defaulting to AI Chatbots

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  • Also known as Enshittification (Score:3)

    by ozzymodus12 ( 8111534 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:28PM (#66385050)
    More things no one asked for. I remember the old days when you had to setup TCP on machines just to access an internet with no pictures. I love progress. However, this is becoming a flavor of hell.

    • Re:Also known as Enshittification (Score:4, Informative)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:38PM (#66385070)
      Turn out AI chatbots get paid less than human beings. Who knew? Could be worse. Back when my Sony DVD player stopped working, the only way to get it serviced under warranty was to talk to the bot on their customer service 800 number, which, lo and behold, refused to understand what I was saying even after I repeated it literally a dozen times. I bet that cut their customer service costs way down, as in nobody ever managed to send a defective unit back for repair! It also cost them at least myself as a customer, I'll never buy anything from Sony again.

      • Re:Also known as Enshittification (Score:5, Informative)

        by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:55PM (#66385124) Homepage
        Often when you search for help with an issue with Google Chrome the search leads to a customer service forum page from years ago with many people asking for help with the same problem. The end result is the problem had no solution and was locked from further comment. I don't see how an AI regurgitating unsolved and locked problems helps at all.

        • Copilot: That argument assumes AI can only repeat what it has seen before. But some of the most interesting AI results, including in mathematics, involve combining known ideas into solutions humans had not previously written down. If synthesis never produced anything new, those results should be impossible. The real debate is whether those successes are common or rare, not whether they can happen at all.

          • And some of those AI results, including those mathemetical proofs, were found to be flat out wrong. Due to a freshman mistake like missing a sign in the equation. Makes you wonder how many of the proofs the were trained on had mistakes...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      I remember the old days when you had to setup TCP on machines just to access an internet with no pictures.

      You are young. I remember the older days when you had to set up an external modem to connect to a university mainframe that MIGHT have internet. With no pictures.

      No ftp or telnet from your actual home computer. If you wanted to download files, kermit, xmodem, and the mainframe's equivalent of 'cat' were your friend.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You are thinking of the time only engineers and tech-fans were allowed on the Internet. We should never have opened it for the general population. That is killing it now.

    • I don't know. Do you actually *like* the endless loops of long, wordy documentation pages that you have to dig through to finally find the answer you want? I certainly don't! Being able to ask an AI agent for the precise answer I want, is a game changer for me.

    • This is almost certainly to cut their costs more than anything, and likely won't be much better than the lack-lustre support they used to offer. However...

      I use GCP a fair bit for $work, and the AI on there is actually pretty good as disentangling the mess that is GCP architecture. It'll follow a chain of resources to go read a log file or whatever and then gives you useful results. It's genuinely been really helpful and saved me a load of time trying to figure out how resource X has suddenly failed because

  • Ok (Score:4, Funny)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:30PM (#66385058) Homepage Journal

    So you will go from getting no help to... Getting no help? And nothing of value was lost.

    • Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @03:40PM (#66385076)
      The economic argument is simple: providing no help while maintaining positive deniability by insisting you do have a customer service "agent", is the cheapest way of providing pretend customer service!

      • Re:Ok (Score:4)

        by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:31PM (#66385334) Homepage Journal

        They've gone from being infamous for offering no support to pretending to offer support?

        I guess it will help people who haven't yet tried everything on their own before they figure out there is no support.

        Happy to be proven wrong and learn that the chatbots are empowered to fix things.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      On the plus-side, the "engagement" score of "support" will go wayyyy up with all the people cursing this abomination into the deepest hell imaginable. Any engagement is good engagement!

    • Thanks for the joke, though I think the story had much more potential for humor.

      There was one period in my motley career when I actually ran the customer service department. Main reason I was able to provide any actual customer service was because no such department existed. No trace in the business plan that the VCs had funded. But it had to be done, so I did it (while mostly doing the job I had been hired for at night from home).

      I actually learned quite a lot from helping the customers and from training o

  • I too was very skeptical given the few customer service chatbots I've used. But then I needed help from Verizon with the new iPhone I bought.
    I was resigned to spending time on hold or in a loop, but the AI they use was pretty well implemented. It tried to help, then when it got stuck it called in it's boss (another AI that makes more money) and this AI sussed out that I needed an agent and presto, an agent was there.
    I think as long as these systems are robust and useful, I'm good with them.
    The bad ones sa

    • It Is Indeed Terrible (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:08PM (#66385170)

      In an alternate universe, the human agent would have answered the phone and then solved the issue.

      No voice prompts. No AI. No AI "boss". No wasted time. No frustration. No aneurysm.

      • Have you actually talked to human agents lately? They know how to read scripts and give you the runaround, not answers. An actual solution from a human agent? Really? Your universe does seem to be an alternate one.

        • Have you actually talked to human agents lately? They know how to read scripts and give you the runaround, not answers. An actual solution from a human agent? Really? Your universe does seem to be an alternate one.

          Like most other modern ills, this is due to profitmaxxing and outsourcing.
          The human mind is an extraordinary abstraction engine. But it is not an infinite abstraction engine.

          For all the decades before 2005ish I could call the 1-800 help line for a dishwasher, or television, or vacuum cleaner, or whatever, and the phone rang at a building owned and staffed by people who were direct employees of the company who made the product. Sprinkled among the people staffing the help line were a number of actual Technic

          • Yes, I agree with your explanation of why human agents have become so useless. It's not because they're human, but because their employers are cheap.

            With that as a baseline (and the baseline isn't going to change any time soon), I would argue that Google's AI answer bot is better than reading through a bunch of documents.

      • > In an alternate universe, the human agent would have answered the phone and then solved the issue.

        Presumably something like this:

        https://youtu.be/nn2FB1P_Mn8?t... [youtu.be]

    • I think it comes down to the tools they give the AI. If it can't actually fix a problem, then it's useless.

      I used the Roblox AI to recover my kid's stolen account, and it was able to do it within a couple minutes. It had a reset-password tool.

      If Google just trains an AI on the help pages, it's not useful.

      • It's not trained on the help pages. It has the help pages in its context. That's an important distinction. It should work pretty well.....so long as the pages have the answer.

    • I just had the opposite experience with PayPal... See my journal.

      When I search for information for complicated things I know a lot about with Gemini, the answers are always at least slightly wrong, and often they are exactly the opposite of accurate, sometimes they are just bananas with no connection to any facts whatsoever. This is going to go like shit.

      • When I search for information for complicated things I know a lot about with Gemini, the answers are always at least slightly wrong, and often they are exactly the opposite of accurate, sometimes they are just bananas with no connection to any facts whatsoever. This is going to go like shit.

        Not even when it's complicated. Last week Gemini tried to summarise an email chain for me. Nothing complicated, no flowery prose, just a couple of people trying to arrange a meeting. Gemini still got it wrong, completely made up input from a party who hadn't even contributed yet.

        Gemini sucks. If Google thinks they can use it to summarise documentation in a useful way they are insane. But given the woeful state of google "support" for normal users, it could hardly get worse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Google help pages are not very helpful. With the chatbot reading them to you, you at least find the information you're looking for. That doesn't mean it is more complete than before, but you have fewer clicks through a FAQ labyrinth than many sites have.

      Have you ever tried to find the Twitter support form? You get asked what your question is and each option leads you either to a FAQ page or a second question. You need to find a very specific path to get to the form where you may reach a human (now probably

      • With the chatbot reading them to you, you at least find the information you're looking for.

        Oh you sweet summer child.

  • So we go from a useless resource page, to a useless and annoying chatbot. Progress!!

  • Take absolutely any business.

    Add "instant, real support by competent Americans"

    Loudly proclaim that your customer service is based on this. Make it a credible promise.

    Charge x% more than your competitors.

    Congratulations: you have a small, lucrative share of the market cornered. You also have a Moat that is AI resistant.

    I only ever contact "customer support" when the company has fucked up and I can accurately explain how and I cannot fix their problem my self.

    But Increasingly companies have simply removed

    • Take absolutely any business.
      Add "instant, real support by competent Americans"
      Loudly proclaim that your customer service is based on this. Make it a credible promise.
      Charge x% more than your competitors.
      Congratulations: you have a small, lucrative share of the market cornered. You also have a Moat that is AI resistant.

      It's a tragedy that more companies haven't worked this out.

  • An AI that can parse my query and give me a useful result faster than me reading through several pages of documentation is a good thing. But this means the AI and its training data have to be suited for the task. There also needs to be two "escape hatches" - one to give me the pre-AI way of doing things and another that will get me to a human being, at least during business hours.

    As for how Google runs its support pages, I don't have enough experience to comment. If the existing documentation is poor, I

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Have you even gotten a single useful answer from these things? My experience is that it rare for them to even only summarize your problem correctly.

  • Great... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:53PM (#66385264)
    If it's anything like the Gemini AI on the regular Google search page it'll be... "Yes, you are completely right. I lied through my ass when I told you that you had to factory reset your device to add a picture to your contacts. Sorry about that! Did you take backups? Would you like to know how to restore backups?"

  • Never had one of those that actually worked (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:15PM (#66385290)

    Always quoting unhelpful documentation and with no insight into what they are supporting. I wonder whether people can even be incapable and dumb enough to have some benefit from that kind of "support".

    • Try it. It actually works quite well. Much better than the old documentation merry-go-round.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I do not use Google products, far too crappy. But the last time an LLM "support" bot has failed me was last week.

        • Not all LLM "support" bots are created equal. As with anything, it depends very much how much money and effort was put into the development of the system. I'm betting the LLM "support" bot you were trying to use, was thrown together cheaply.

  • I bought a macOS extension for ext in Mac last year. Something happened and I can't log in to reactivate the software so I can backup my Dropbox to cancel my subscription.

    I was forwarded to a chat bot recently that does nothing. I've been through password reset multiple times and it does nothing. When I AI support by email... they seem to do another reset without a reply email.

    I haven't been able to use software I paid for for about a year. Can't even pay for a new license because I can't login.

    Do you re

  • I see a lot of comments from people here who already know exactly how well it works and why it is "yet another thing nobody asked for", etc. What is quite obviously absent is comments from anyone who felt the need to actually try it before already knowing how well it works. Welcome to Slashot circa 2026, where there are mostly "experts" commenting who don't need to even know what the questions are to already have all of the answers.
  • That's what the billionaires are working toward, the wolf you feed.

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