I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100

And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.

There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.

What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.