The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.

I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it’s the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating “bubbles” to put individual users into. It’s all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don’t is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.

Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won’t. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.

Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn’t it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.