The first of the two steps is a web search. The model didn’t answer from its trained weights.

The model just asked the crawler to get a recent copy of relevant pages and used that to give the answer. That is why AI companies experimenting with browsers or at least agentic extensions to browsers as that allows to fetch on behalf of the user directly from the device with a residential IP and ditch expensive to maintain crawling infrastructure.

Google search may survive as a backend service, sure.