Google Saw “Is We Getting” and Immediately Thought Stimulus Checks. Now Explain That.

Man, the internet finds some shit.

Somebody on X posted two screenshots of Google searches, and I had to look at them twice.

The first search was “is we getting”. Google's AI Overview apparently decided the person must be asking about federal stimulus checks and started explaining that the government wasn't issuing new payments.

Then the person changed the search to “are we getting”. And suddenly Google didn't know what they were talking about. It asked them to finish the question.

Now hold on. Both questions are incomplete. Neither one mentions money, the government, stimulus checks or anything financial. So why did one get an answer about stimulus payments while the other got asked for clarification?

Look at the screenshots for yourself

Why the difference matters

The difference itself is interesting. But it doesn't prove Google somehow knew the user's race. A single pair of screenshots can't tell us what earlier searches, location, language settings, personalization or other context the system considered; AI-generated results can also vary across attempts.

That being said, there is an actual question here about what associations a language model might have learned. Why would that particular phrasing potentially lead an AI system toward financial assistance rather than the same clarifying question it gave the more conventional phrasing?

Is it some kind of linguistic stereotype? Is the search engine drawing on previous searches about stimulus checks? Or is there some other context that isn't visible in these pictures? We don't know yet.

Language shouldn't tell an AI what kind of person you are

See, “is we getting” is the kind of language people might associate with Black American speech, particularly African American English. That doesn't mean everybody who uses it is Black, and it doesn't mean that's the only way Black Americans speak.

But it raises a question about what assumptions these systems might make when processing different dialects. And that broader concern isn't imaginary. Researchers have documented real disparities in how language models process African American English compared with Standard American English.

A 2025 research paper, 'Disparities in LLM Reasoning Accuracy and Explanations: A Case Study on African American English,' reported lower reasoning accuracy and simpler explanations for AAE versions of comparable prompts in the systems studied. And a 2024 Nature paper, 'AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect,' found troubling dialect-based stereotypes and decision disparities in the language models they tested.

Neither study was an audit of this October 2026 Google AI Overview screenshot, and neither proves what caused it. But they're reasons to ask the question seriously rather than treat it as just another meme.

What we can actually say

I can't independently reproduce the paired AI Overviews under controlled conditions, so I'm not about to call two screenshots a scientific experiment and announce that we've proven Google is racist.

But I'm also not going to dismiss the concern just because somebody has a plausible alternative explanation. The screenshots show two noticeably different responses to similarly incomplete searches; that is what deserves testing.

To settle it, you'd want repeated searches using the same device conditions, account settings, location and time, changing only the wording, and a documented sample large enough to show whether the difference persists. Then Google should have the chance to explain how that particular feature behaves.

Here's my issue with it

Personally, what bothers me is the assumption.

If I ask an incomplete question, ask me to finish it. Don't decide what I'm probably asking based on how I talk.

And that applies to everybody, regardless of race, nationality, dialect or education. AI is becoming one of the first places people go for information. That means the subtle differences are worth examining—not just the obviously offensive stuff.

Because a system doesn't have to use a slur or explicitly mention someone's race for its output to raise a legitimate question about how it treats people.

Sometimes the more revealing question is simply: why did you assume that was what I meant?