> If the AI search result tells you everything you need, why would you ever visit the actual website?

AI has this problem in reverse: If search gets me what I need, why would I use an AI middleman?

When it works, it successfully regurgitates the information contained in the source pages, with enough completeness, correctness, and context to be useful for my purposes… and when it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

At best it works about as well as regular search, and you don’t always get the best.

(just note: everything in AI is in the “attract users” phase. The “degrade” phase, where they switch to profits is inevitable — the valuations of AI companies make this a certainty. That is, AI search will get worse — a lot worse — as it is changed to focus on influencing how users spend their money and vote, to benefit the people controlling the AI, rather than help the users.)

AI summaries are pretty useful (at least for now), and that’s part of AI search. But you want to choose the content it summarizes.

> But you want to choose the content it summarizes.

Absolutely. The problem is that I think 95% of users will not do that unfortunately. I've helped many a dev with some code that was just complete nonsense that was seemingly written in confidence. Turns out it was a blind LLM copy-paste. Just as empty as the old Stack Overflow version. At least LLM code has gotten higher quality. We will absolutely end up with tons of "seems okay" copy-pasted code from LLMs and I'm not sure how well that turns out long term. Maybe fine (especially if LLMs can edit later).