https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/ai-assisted-search/

[Adam Engst calls them “answer engines” (AE) and that is a great term]

“I’ve been throwing all kinds of questions at [search enabled] ChatGPT (in o3 or o4-mini mode) and getting back genuinely useful answers grounded in search results.”

Search-based research has worked in Perplexity for me for about a year. They really don’t get enough credit. The new chatGPT answer engine is much faster though.

A key contributor is ability to search academic refs including the once ignored Allen Institute for AI’s Semantic Scholar.

Legacy Google Search is a relic, legacy Big Publishing is “suddenly” very powerful, and the pivot of ad budgets to Answer Engines is going to accelerate search engine death.