> I follow those source links all the time.

The vast majority of people don’t.

We’ve gone from Only links to the source -> Mostly links to the source, with a short summary picked almost verbatim from the source -> AI summary that mangles several sources’ information together and gets top billing -> Only the AI summary with some footnotes linking to the source.

Google has been fairly slowly been turning up the temperature of the pot and we’re only a few degrees away from a full boil. Let’s not pretend or be naive enough to think that’s not what’s happening.

Ask any publisher and you will get a resounding "yes, it is very different." On average they're able to attribute about a 33% decrease (globally) in traffic to google's (or others') AI answers. [1]

You're right that there are competitors, but those competitors are doing the same thing: hoovering up content and then not giving anything back for it. There are deals in place for some of the largest publishers [2] [3], but that leaves a ton of content out in the cold. That's going to decrease the amount of content that's out there, which will decrease the quality of AI search. I don't know where that ends, but given how leveraged the economy is in AI it seems like a good idea for somebody to figure it out.

[1] https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/...

[2] https://futureweek.com/a-complete-list-of-publishers-strikin...

[3] https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-betw...

> The AI answers provide tons of source links.

A lot of the time, the answer itself is good, but the links are spam blogs and Tiktok videos. I don't think there's a real connection between how the text is generated and what "references" are picked for it. I just searched for a math history topic and the reference was a literal TikTok video that's an advertisement for a sketchy mobile calculator app?

So yeah, these references are boosting web content, but it has nothing to do with the high-quality sources used to train the LLMs in the first place.

> is it really all that different to provide a list of links

Probably not, but I don't like change.

Most people don't look at the sources even though the sources often contradict the statements.

I've stopped using Google and find I'm not missing anything