The study examines how conversational LLM agents—specifically ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek—use Web search, combining real user interactions with controlled API experiments. It finds that agents differ in when they decide to search, how they craft queries, and which domains they favor, and that more frequent searching does not always improve answer quality. While most responses are grounded in search results, some claims are unsupported, raising attribution concerns.
By Mahsa Amani, Seungeon Lee, Abhisek Dash, Asmaa El Fraihi, Yunah Jang, Elisabeth Kirsten, Qinyuan Wu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Manish Gupta, Abhilasha Ravichander, Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Soumi Das
arXiv:2609.18729v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Consumers increasingly use AI chatbots for advice on what to buy. With companies like OpenAI and Google monetising their AI through advertising, this...
By Lucas G. Uberti-Bona Marin, Thales Bertaglia, Giovanni Astante, Bram Rijsbosch, Gijs van Dijck, Anik\'o Hann\'ak, Gerasimos Spanakis, Konrad Kollnig
arXiv:2603.16138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Generative search systems are increasingly replacing link-based retrieval with AI-generated summaries, yet little is known about how these sy...
By Michelle Huang, Agam Goyal, Koustuv Saha, Eshwar Chandrasekharan
arXiv:2510. 11560v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The advent of LLMs has given rise to generative search, a new search paradigm in which LLMs retrieve information from the web related to a query and synthesize it into a single, coherent response.
By Elisabeth Kirsten, Jost Grosse Perdekamp, Qinyuan Wu, Mihir Upadhyay, Krishna P. Gummadi, Muhammad Bilal Zafar
arXiv:2607. 20328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study empirically analyzed generative AI as an emerging discovery pathway to academic library resources.
By Hae Min Kim, Stacy Stanislaw
arXiv:2607. 03886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sponsored search plays a crucial role as a revenue stream for search engines, wherein advertisers competitively bid on keywords that align with the users' search queries.
By Md Omar Faruk Rokon, Andrei Simion, Weizhi Du, Musen Wen, Hong Yao, Kuang-chih Lee
arXiv:2605. 12887v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web-enabled LLM agents are changing how online information influences search outcomes.
By Hengwei Ye, Jiasheng Mao, Zhenhan Guan, Zheng Tian
arXiv:2609.34951v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In 2023, AI models answered from training data and hallucinated when it ran out, and businesses were told to seed that knowledge. Models' training...
By Ido Finder, Assaf Elovic, Gad Shalev, Liad Yosef
arXiv:2604. 08525v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with user preferences through methods like reinforcement learning.
By Addison J. Wu, Ryan Liu, Shuyue Stella Li, Yulia Tsvetkov, Thomas L. Griffiths
arXiv:2608. 08395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI is shifting digital commerce from browsing toward agentic search, in which consumers delegate product discovery to AI agents.
By Lingxiu Dong, Kaiwen Luo, Fasheng Xu
arXiv:2607. 01530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding user intent is fundamental to delivering relevant search results in e-commerce.
By Rachith Aiyappa, Ishita Khan, Chester Palen-Michel, Jayanth Yetukuri, Samarth Agrawal, Mehran Elyasi, Shuang Zhou
arXiv:2606. 07489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end.
By Jeremy Yang, Kate Zyskowski, Noah Yonack, Jerry Ma