On August 17, 2026, Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that AI Overviews had been generating images without a user request, without an AI-generated label, and without source attribution. Google VP of Product Robby Stein called it "a small experiment we're no longer running." The story broke four days earlier, on August 13, when a recipe publisher documented an AI-generated illustration appearing for a spaghetti squash query with no image request at all.
Two separate generation paths
For four days, nobody publicly explained what was happening or under whose authority. When an answer finally came, it revealed that AI Overviews runs image generation on at least two distinct code paths.
The first is the officially announced feature from July 2026 ("Nano Banana"), which only creates an image when a user explicitly requests one. It continues to work unchanged.
The second was never publicly announced and triggered automatically - the system decided on its own that an answer needed an illustration. This is the path Google paused.
Why this matters for content targeting Google.pl
The mechanism exposed here isn't tied to any specific language or market: AI Overview can visually interpret a page's content and present its own illustration as part of the answer, without linking to the source or notifying the site owner. For sites publishing recipes, instructions, or step-by-step guides - content that naturally invites illustration - this is a direct signal worth noting.
No corrective action is needed right now, since this specific unannounced path is already disabled. But when planning content strategy for AI Overview on the Polish market, it's worth remembering the system is capable of autonomous presentation decisions that were never announced and could resurface in another form.
The transparency problem
It took four days of public silence and direct press questions before Google offered an official comment - telling on its own. Some AI Overview behavior isn't documented until an outside observer notices and publishes a finding. For SEO practitioners working the Polish market, the practical lesson is: AI Overview behavior observed today doesn't guarantee the same behavior next week, and some changes will never be announced - only documented after the fact by outside observers, as happened here.
Practical note
If a site publishes heavily visual content (recipes, instructions, comparison tables) for a Polish audience, it's worth periodically checking Google.pl search results for key queries manually and saving screenshots - exactly the practice that let this incident come to light on August 13. No formal monitoring tool for this specific signal exists yet.
It's worth logging not just whether an illustration appears, but whether its visual style resembles the branding of a specific site in the results. A clear resemblance is a stronger argument when raising the issue with Google directly or discussing it publicly, the way the spaghetti squash case eventually was.
