Christo Wilson
Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Student Experience, Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Northeastern University
Christo Wilson is a professor and associate dean in Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences in Boston, where he runs algorithm audits of large tech platforms. His studies of Google Search have measured how much of the search market Google controls and, more recently, how reliable its AI Overviews are.
Measuring Google's Gatekeeping Power
"People are starting at Google, and yeah, you might go on to do a search on Amazon, but you started at Google and that gives them enormous power to shape what you're shown and ultimately where you go," Wilson told Northeastern Global News in August 2024. "If they want you to have terminal searching and they just show you answers from [Google AI chatbot] Gemini, they can push that and dramatically alter peoples' behavior at very large scales very quickly."
The comment came with a study that tested Google's own defense in its antitrust case, that it competes with every site that has a search box. Wilson's team gave a panel of US residents a browser extension and sorted their searches into 30 categories. Google still handled more than half of searches in 21 of them, and people began their search on Google in 24. "Guess what? It still looks like Google's world," he said. The paper won an honorable mention at ICWSM 2024. The same year he co-authored a study of the revenue search engines earn from navigational and brand advertising.
Doubts About AI as a Rival to Google
When the judge in the case ordered Google to share search data with qualified competitors in September 2025, partly on the view that AI search would bring new competition, Wilson called the remedy "a historic misfire" in comments to the Associated Press. He doubted the AI argument as well. "There is very little data suggesting that the AI companies are seriously challenging Google in the search space," he said. "But even if we accept the thesis that AI is going to change how search works, that doesn't mean Google is going anywhere. Gemini is deeply integrated into all their products now."
Auditing AI Overviews
With researchers at the University of Zurich, including Aleksandra Urman and Anikó Hannák, Wilson co-authored an audit of Google's AI Overviews and featured snippets across 1,508 real baby care and pregnancy queries, published at ICWSM 2026. AI Overviews appeared on 84% of those searches. When an overview and a featured snippet showed on the same page, they disagreed in 33% of cases, and medical safeguards appeared in only 11% of overviews. Low- and medium-credibility sites accounted for nearly half of the citations among the most-cited domains.
From Santa Barbara to Northeastern
Wilson earned his bachelor's, master's and PhD in computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At Northeastern he is a founding member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and co-principal investigator of the National Internet Observatory, an NSF-funded panel of US residents' browsing data offered to qualified researchers. He is also a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 2019, served as co-general chair of the first ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in 2018, and has won best paper awards at SIGCOMM, NDSS and ICWSM.