Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it
- Reference: 1776933906
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/04/23/stale_govuk_pages_are_feeding/
- Source link:
The problem, senior content designer Giorgio Di Tunno and content operations lead Neil Starr wrote in a GOV.UK [1]blog post , is that outdated pages no longer maintained are now being actively scraped to answer user queries.
A Google search for the cost of setting up a charity in the UK, for instance, returned an AI overview citing £13 online or £40 by post for Companies House incorporation - figures pulled from an unmaintained legacy page. The actual cost is £100 online or £124 by post.
[2]
When The Reg tried the same search, Google's AI overview first said incorporation was free, then a day later offered "roughly £13-£183+." Neither was accurate.
[3]
[4]
"The problem isn't that the government is trying to trip people up (it isn’t), but that inconsistent information surfaced by the AI overview feels that way to users," Di Tunno and Starr wrote. "That perception alone can undermine confidence in government services."
"In the past, most of those outdated, niche pages would fall into the 0-view abyss, never to be stumbled on again." Now, agentic search processes for generative AI summaries draw on these pages to answer specific queries.
[5]AI is reshaping Britain's datacenter map away from London
[6]UK.gov kicks off half-a-billion quid sovereign AI venture with £80M invite
[7]Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization
[8]Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services
To tackle this, DBT audited GOV.UK pages that hadn't been updated in five years, had fewer than 11 views in that period, were meant to carry current information, and had no active owner, including those published by the defunct Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It found 150 pages which have since been redirected to archived copies, current GOV.UK pages or relevant legislation.
The department is also testing six-monthly review cycles, with last and next review dates displayed at the bottom of each page. Tunno and Starr said this has gone down "extremely well with real users" as it helps them to trust the material.
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AI summaries - which search engines often provide as their top results to user queries - are causing other problems for government content designers. The Department for Education’s head of design, Mark Edwards, recently warned these provide misleadingly narrow or incomplete answers to questions.
"We now need to design with the expectation that much of what we publish will be read indirectly, atomized, summarized or reinterpreted by systems we don't control," he [10]wrote earlier this month . ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/04/20/how-were-preventing-ai-misinformation-at-dbt/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aentxJolzAl8M45eCfbtDwAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aentxJolzAl8M45eCfbtDwAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aentxJolzAl8M45eCfbtDwAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/20/ai_is_reshaping_britains_datacenter/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/20/ukgov_kicks_off_500m_ai/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/wales_government_copilot/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/07/ai_public_sector_poll/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aentxJolzAl8M45eCfbtDwAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/ai_search_is_atomising_content/
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Translation: "People will actually read our pages at scale and find out we have been doing poor job"
IoW some departments have no process for removing pages when they're superseded. Sir Humphrey would be most displeased.
Not only is there no such process but nobody is allowed to tell anyone else when pages need to be removed or updated. There might even be pages that have old superseded names for the PM and head of the Foreign Office!
Shit in.....
Shit out.
AI like this is just fancy searching isn't it.... but being too lazy to go direct and actually look at GOV webpages, so where does the issue lay?
Similar issues with the NHS
I needed to ask a general question of a local hospital. An NHS website gave an email contact address for such enquiries. I sent an email and got an automated reply back saying the email address had been discontinued and to email a different address. Tried the new address. Never got a reply. Sigh.
Remember, data is not ephemeral. It lasts forever[0].
However, it is quite capable of becoming stale. As I've mused elsewhere, what percentage of the combined mass of a government or a company's data can become stale, before that whole mass of data becomes virtually useless?
Searching alpha-goo for information on a few people who I personally know very well shows that data to be staler than last month's bread. In a couple cases, it is heading past the compost stage and into the sludge at the bottom of the septic tank territory. And in many of those cases, it has also been intentionally corrupted by the people in question.
Combine that with the fact that everybody seems to think that collecting any and all data possible off "The Internet" (whatever that means these days) is a good thing, despite the fact that such bulk slurping is by its very nature full of demonstrably incorrect, incomplete, incompatible and/or irrelevant data ... At some point, entropy says the data will become completely useless. Gut feeling is that we are getting very close to that point.
And we're using that clusterfuck of garbage to feed so-called AI? Lovely. No wonder it's prone to "hallucinating" Back in my day, we called it GIGO.
[0] When stored properly.
"We now need to design with the expectation that much of what we publish will be read indirectly, atomized, summarized or reinterpreted by systems we don't control,"
The machines are now our masters.