Comment by potatolicious

The important thing is that with Web Search as a user you can learn to adapt to varying information quality. I have a higher trust for Wikipedia.org than I do for SEO-R-US.com, and Google gives me these options.

With a chatbot that's largely impossible, or at least impractical. I don't know where it's getting anything from - maybe it trained on a shitty Reddit post that's 100% wrong, but I have no way to tell.

There has been some work (see: Bard, Bing) where the LLM attempts to cite its sources, but even then that's of limited use. If I get a paragraph of text as an answer, is the expectation really that I crawl through each substring to determine their individual provenances and trustworthiness?

The shape of a product matters. Google as a linker introduces the ability to adapt to imperfect information quality, whereas a chatbot does not.

As an exemplar of this point - I don't trust when Google simply pulls answers from other sites and shows it in-line in the search results. I don't know if I should trust the source! At least there I can find out the source from a single click - with a chatbot that's largely impossible.