I only meant about the use of footnotes links. The AI themselves are quite bad but can also be useful if you learn not to take everything at face value. One example of it failing is when I search for my own name it mixes up a bunch of people together so I end up being a dead murderer from the 70's, a house rental person, a developer and also a pianist.
Footnote links still don't solve the financial model, primarily because nobody clicks on them.
There was congressional testimony by the founder/owner of "Celebrity Net Worth" about how Google made it impossible for them to stay in business. Whenever somebody would search "How much is <celebrity X> worth?", the answer would just show up directly on the Google results page. There was still an attribution link to Celebrity Net Worth, but nobody ever clicked on it anymore, so the result was Celebrity Net Worth had to shut down.
You can certainly argue fairly whether sites like CNW deserve to exist in the first place, but it's not hard to see how there is still a huge financial problem when ALL the ad revenue goes to the search engines and they don't even leave any of the slim scraps to the publisher sites.
