Despite both chatbots and search engines scouring the internet for information to answer your requests, it appears that they are approaching the task in very different ways.

A new paper published by researchers at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems compared the results of Google against Google’s AI overviews, Gemini 2.5, and GPT-4o web search.

While both Google search and AI chatbots were attempting to resolve the same questions, it was found that AI chatbots were pulling information from a much wider selection of sources, sometimes retrieving answers from pages that were buried deep in Google’s search results and would almost never be found otherwise.

The queries that the study tested ranged from specific questions and political discussi

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