This is one of the situations where "you are the product" applies. They would prefer to produce an inline response because it keeps you from going to another w

This is one of the situations where "you are the product" applies. They would prefer to produce an inline response because it keeps you from going to another website. This way they don't have to share you with a third party. Which ultimately means they can show you more ads or have more time to find some other way to monetize you. Remember, search engines have been employing this strategy for some time with a variety of inline responses to many searches. The open web is generally the least profitable thing they can direct you to. ChatGPT simply represents an expansion of the business strategy that's already in place when you do a currency conversion or ask for hotel rates or ask a question that has FAQ structured data associated with it on some website. All about keeping you on the page/in network for as long as possible. It doesn't matter if the classical notion of web search is better or is what you really want. They will invest in this model instead if it's more profitable (and to be fair they will attempt to make this model better so that it compares favorably to web search for users, this just isn't the primary goal).