> Who is "we"? Definitely not Google or any other major tech company, they're all actively encouraging this.

Google has been fighting aggressively to replace its search results with snippets, now generated by LLMs, to avoid sending traffic to other websites. If they continue, they will basically lead Google Search to a tipping point where a good competitor can take this market by storm. Microsoft also believed Windows is indestructible and now they have a rude awakening.

The fact is what people really want from a search engine is a single perfect result that answers their query exactly. An LLM does the 'single result' bit, but it's dubious whether or not it's a perfect answer. Most of the time that's probably not very important so long as the answer satisfies the search enough that the user is happy.

Google is trying to turn Search into that product e.g. the single answer to a given search. They could do that now with Gemini, but the ads in the results are what makes them money, and the backlash to embedding adverts into the output of Gemini would drive millions of people to OpenAI overnight. They have to do it slowly. Give it 5 years though, and search engine results pages will be a thing of the past.