Search engines have been corrupted by SEO garbage and ads presented as legitimate search results. Calling an ad “sponsored” is disingenuous at best. Using LLMs instead of searching is a logical progression. Slightly related to that are the people that search and just read the LLM summary at the top.

I’ve heard from marketing people that they’re starting to publish blog spam to try and steer people’s LLM conversations, so I think even the current LLM usage will eventually be even worse than search is currently.