Wired explains when AI chatbots help with web search and when not to use them

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In short: More people are using AI chatbots to search the web, but the best choice depends on how accurate and source-heavy your question is.

What's going on

AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can now “search the web” for you. In practice, they often do two things at once. They look up pages online like a normal search engine, and they also use patterns learned from past text to write a neat summary (like a helpful assistant rewriting what it found).

Wired says this works well for simple, well-known facts, like the height of the Empire State Building. It can also help with complicated requests that involve many steps, like finding family-friendly restaurants in San Francisco under a certain budget. In those cases, the chatbot can pull from multiple pages and combine the information into one answer, instead of making you open lots of links.

The risk is that chatbots may sound confident even when they are wrong. Stanford research cited by Wired suggests that when a chatbot finds a good source, it is usually good at pulling the right details from it. The problem is that it may choose weak sources, misunderstand the question, or fill gaps with a made-up guess.

What to watch

Wired argues that old-fashioned search can be better when details must be exact, like quotes, statistics, or product specs, and when you want to pick trusted websites yourself. It can also be safer for breaking news and high-stakes topics like health, legal issues, and money. If you do use AI search, it is worth clicking the sources it lists and double-checking, especially for anything important.

Source: Wired