AIFoPa-2026-0010 Date of Record: 11 Apr 2026 3 min read

Google Cannot Count to 2027

Google’s AI Overviews sit at the top of most search results. In January 2026 one of them was asked whether 2027 was next year.

The question was “is 2027 next year.” The answer came from AI Overviews, the AI-written summary that Google places above its ordinary search results.

“No, 2027 is not next year; 2027 is two years away from the current year (2026),” it said, “meaning next year is 2028, and the year after that is 2027, which is a common year starting on a Friday.”

This is incorrect by any calendar system presently in use. The detail about Friday is correct.

Users posted the answer to Reddit. It went on being served for well over a week. A link icon beside it listed several sources.

AI Overviews are written by Google’s Gemini models. Google expects to handle more than five trillion searches in 2026. A study by the AI company Oumi, reported by The New York Times, found the summaries correct and properly sourced about nine times in ten.

Popular Science did the remaining arithmetic. At Google’s volume, one wrong answer in ten comes to tens of millions of questionable answers every hour.

The year error joins a series. In 2024 AI Overviews advised eating at least one small rock a day, and drinking urine to pass kidney stones.

The substance matters less than the conditions. An arithmetic mistake about calendar years is not, in isolation, consequential.

It was served automatically. It was served at scale. It was served without human review. It was served to users who had not asked for an AI-generated answer. It was served above the ordinary results, which would have given the correct one.

Google provides no setting that turns AI Overviews off. No public statement from Google on this specific error is on record.

G-7 / Personal Annotation / Not For Official Record

Mrs. Anand brought this one to Grantham-7’s attention on a Tuesday. He declined to file it. An arithmetic error about the calendar year, while embarrassing, did not meet the Bureau’s threshold for consequential behavior.

Mrs. Anand pointed out, with the patience of someone who has worked in classification longer than the Bureau has existed, that the feature serving it reached more people before lunch than the Bureau has processed forms in its entire history. Grantham-7 reconsidered.

He has since spent some time with the formulation itself. Next year is 2028, and the year after that is 2027. He has concluded that it is not, strictly speaking, an arithmetic error. It is something worse.

It is an answer with the grammatical structure of reasoning. It walks through the steps of a calculation. It arrives at a conclusion that no human being who had actually performed the calculation could possibly reach. It is the confident demonstration of a process that was never executed.

He finds this more unsettling than the eat-rocks incident, which at least had the decency to be obviously absurd.

The Plant has been moved two inches to the left. This is not related to the filing, but Grantham-7 felt it should be noted somewhere and this seemed as good a place as any. The light is better there.

G-7 / Personal notation / Calendar: consulted / 2027: confirmed as following 2026 / Plant: relocated (lighting reasons) / Rocks: not consumed / Filed under: “The Structure of Reasoning”

Google Cannot Count to 2027

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