My impression is that recently ChatGPT tries to avoid going out to research on the Internet as long as it can. I have to tell it to pull info from the web or verify its answers on the web explicitly.

Could it be that they are trying to save traffic?

My non-existent marketing instinct would tell me that they are trying to keep you inside the app to convince you that ChatGPT is the internet, the same way some people wouldn't know there's life outside Facebook.

My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.