As a regular user of both Perplexity and Google AI Mode, I noticed that this move is more or less organic for the Google layout, but not so for Perplexity (if it decides to implement something similar). While blocks of links at Google are always visible, for Perplexity the block of links related to the question requires a click to be shown. Most users of Perplexity who care about checking sources mostly click the inline links that directly navigate to the pages.

It is also interesting that at first when I started using Perplexity I expected for it to understand my question semantically and then use some derivative (correct) terms to query the web. The reality is that, probably for the sake of speed, the web search is performed first, and then the results are summarized. This leads in many cases to a mixed, somehow embarrassing set of links where one obviously sees that not all links in the block are relevant. Maybe Google uses something similar and both tend not to present the block of links as distilled correct knowledge blocks. But Google made the top-right block smaller and relying on the scrolling so this embarrassing effect might be less pronounced.

I wonder if at some point AI will help big tech extort money from businesses or individuals (similar to the mugshot publishing industry).

Google or its competitors can theoretically accept(or demand) money for its "Answer engine" to refuse answering certain questions that affect local businesses e.g. paid services (like plumbing services in the article) vs diy instructions based on the location of user.

Of course that assumes people will use only AI for discovery but I suspect that future is not impossible or too far.

Time for an AI to weed out AI Ads.