Google AI Overview caught serving local searches using low quality listicles

Saw this today and thought it was pretty interesting.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-overview-local-results-listicles-41854.html

Google's AI Overviews for local searches have been caught pulling information from those generic "best X in city" listicles.

In one example, a lawyer had basically published his own list of law firms and Google was using that page as the source for information about the businesses showing in the results.

Obviously Google will probably clean up examples this bad eventually. But it raises a more interesting question.

If Google is using third party listicles to understand and describe local businesses, are these pages becoming useful for more than just the backlink?

Anyone testing this yet?

AI overviews also gives faulty code as well,it copies code patterns from other websites talking about the same thing to "predict" the code

A few days ago, I saw this on Reddit with the caption "AI fails." I hope G will fix this quick. That looks pathetic!

This makes third-party mentions look more like entity validation than simple link building. The interesting test would be whether consistent mentions across several independent local pages change how AI Overview describes a business.