

So we’re talking about SEO and the content being generated in the first place? Yeah, it’s worse than it used to be when the main application online was websites, but I still want/need a reliable way to parse results across… you know, Wikipedia and Reddit, mostly. IMDB sometimes. It may have looped around to the old days of Altavista directory search, but it’s still a valuable tool. And crucially not replaced by an LLM, especially for the kind of non-obvious queries where you don´t just go to the site you know will have the answer directly.
The LLM is going over the search results, taking them as a prompt and then generating a summary of the results as an output.
The search results are generated by the good old search engine, the “AI summary” option at the top is just doing the reading for you.
And of course if the answer isn’t trivial, very likely generating an inaccurate or incorrect output from the inputs.
But none of that changes how the underlying search engine works. It’s just doing additional work on the same results the same search engine generates.
EDIT: Just to clarify, DDG also has a “chat” service that, as far as I can tell, is just an UI overlay over whatever model you select. That just works the same way as all the AI chatbots you can use online or host locally and I presume it’s not what we’re talking about.