An angle I hadn't thought of before:
Big Tech would love for this to be true: "LLMs provide better value than doing a quick web search and finding out yourself"
What if the way they're primarily tipping this balance is not by making LLMs better, but by actively making web search worse?
(It sounds far-fetched at first, but "let's make product X worse to promote product Y instead" is in fact a common trope in the industry.)