# Dodo Digest: The Problem Isn't AI Search. It's Rushed Products. > Google's AI search is facing backlash as users question response quality. The real risk isn't AI itself, it's shipping products faster than they're ready. Plus, we shipped Dodo Payments v1.99.0 with a major product revamp. - **Author**: Rishabh Goel - **Published**: 2026-05-31 - **Category**: Newsletter - **URL**: https://dodopayments.com/blogs/newsletter-may31 --- ## The Problem Isn't AI Search. It's Rushed Products. ### TL;DR - Google's AI search is starting to face visible backlash as users question the quality and reliability of responses. - Incidents like Google AI over-explaining simple prompts such as "disregard" are exposing the risks of shipping AI products too aggressively. - The issue isn't AI itself, it's the pressure to move faster than the product is ready for. - Founders should treat quality, trust, and reliability as long-term advantages, not launch blockers. - Alongside this, we shipped Dodo Payments v1.99.0 with a major product revamp. ## Hello everyone, A couple of days ago, people started noticing something strange with Google's AI search. Users searching for the word "disregard" were getting bizarrely overcomplicated responses from Google's AI layer, almost as if the system was trying too hard to sound intelligent instead of simply being useful. At first, it looked funny. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like a symptom of something bigger. Because this isn't really about one bad response. It's about what happens when products get pushed into the market faster than they're fully ready. And right now, AI feels like it's entering that phase everywhere. Google AI over-explaining a simple "disregard" prompt ## The Signal There's a clear shift happening in how users are reacting to AI-first products. For the last two years, most companies have been racing to integrate AI into everything possible. Search, productivity tools, browsers, customer support, operating systems, every product suddenly needed an AI layer. But now users are starting to distinguish between AI that is genuinely useful and AI that simply exists because companies feel pressured to ship it. That difference matters more than it seems. Google's AI search rollout is a perfect example. Instead of making search feel simpler, there are moments where it feels more confusing, more bloated, and less reliable than the system it replaced. And users notice that very quickly. DuckDuckGo reportedly saw a major increase in installs recently as more users started looking for alternatives to heavily AI-layered search experiences. That doesn't mean people are rejecting AI entirely. It means they're rejecting bad product experiences. DuckDuckGo leaning into a "No AI" search experience ## Where Things Start to Break The pressure around AI right now is enormous. Every company wants to show momentum. Every startup wants to prove they're "AI-native." Every product launch wants to look revolutionary. But when speed becomes the main priority, quality usually becomes the tradeoff. And that creates a dangerous cycle. Products launch before they're properly refined. Features get added before the experience is stable. Systems become technically impressive but operationally unreliable. Over time, users stop caring about the technology itself. They start caring about whether they can trust the product. And trust is much harder to recover once it breaks. That's why the conversation around an "AI bubble" feels incomplete to me. The real risk isn't that AI disappears. It's that companies rush immature products into critical workflows before they're actually reliable enough to deserve that level of trust. ## How To Think About This Here's how to approach this if you're building right now: 1. **Don't confuse shipping fast with building well** -- Speed matters, but trust compounds much longer than hype does. 2. **Optimize for usefulness, not intelligence theatre** -- Users care more about reliable outcomes than systems sounding impressive. 3. **Treat quality as infrastructure** -- The experience around the product matters just as much as the technology itself. 4. **Build for long-term trust** -- People forgive missing features faster than they forgive unreliable systems. 5. **Refine before scaling aggressively** -- Once a product becomes part of someone's workflow, stability matters more than novelty. ## What We Shipped This is something we've been thinking about a lot internally as well. Over the last few weeks, we spent a significant amount of time reworking large parts of the Dodo Payments experience to make the platform clearer, faster, and easier to navigate. The goal wasn't just visual polish. It was making the entire workflow feel lighter and more intuitive as the platform continues to grow. As products evolve, complexity builds up quietly. More features, more payment flows, more edge cases, more configurations. Over time, even good systems start feeling harder to operate if the experience isn't continuously refined. So this revamp focused heavily on simplifying workflows across subscriptions, billing, products, and checkout experiences while improving visibility into customer activity and payment operations. Alongside the broader redesign, we also shipped several updates in v1.99.0: - Stacked discount codes, allowing multiple discounts to be combined within the same checkout flow - Improved subscription management with cleaner lifecycle handling - Better customer and billing visibility across dashboards - Expanded payment method support, including Sunbit - Cleaner product and checkout experiences across flows - General usability, reliability, and performance improvements across the platform A lot of these updates may seem small individually, but infrastructure products are usually judged through repetition. Small friction points repeated every day eventually become operational problems. And at the end of the day, payment systems only work if people feel confident using them repeatedly. A cleaner Dodo Payments checkout: before and after the revamp ## One Last Thought AI will absolutely reshape products over the next decade. That part feels inevitable. But the companies that survive this phase won't just be the ones shipping the fastest. They'll be the ones building products people continue trusting after the novelty disappears. Because eventually, users stop caring that something is powered by AI. They just care whether it works. Also, join our loving [Discord community](https://discord.gg/dodo-payments-1305511580854779984)! Best, **Rishabh Goel** **Co-Founder, Dodo Payments** --- - [More Newsletter articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs/category/newsletter) - [All articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs)