As anyone who uses the internet will know, the way we find information has fundamentally changed. For the last three decades, search engines have delivered ranked lists of links in response to our queries, and it was our job to search through them to find what we wanted. Now, major search engines use generative AI tools to deliver a single coherent answer, often embedded with a few links. But how does this approach compare with the traditional method? In a comprehensive new study, scientists compared these two approaches to see what we are gaining and losing.