That's because search engines have reached the stage of enshittification where they no longer need to be good. Instead, they want you to spend as much time there as possible.

LLMs are still being sold as "the better option" - including by the exact same search giants who intentionally ruined their own search results. And many of them are already prioritizing agreeableness over "truthfulness." And we're still in the LLM honeymoon phase, where companies are losing billions of dollars on a yearly basis and undercharging their users.