Garbage-ness of search results is not binary, the right question is: can LLMs improve the quality of search results? But sure, it won't end the cat and mouse game.
I think that's the right broad question. Though LLMs properties mean that for some number of cases they will either make the results worse, or more confidently present wrong answers. This prompts the question: what do we mean by "quality" of results? Since the way current LLM interfaces tend to present results is quite different from traditional search.
The question is what is the business model and who pays for it, that determines how much advertising you’re getting. It is not clear if OpenAI could compete in Ad-supported search. So maybe OpenAI is trying to do the basic research, outcompete the Bing research group at Microsoft and then serve as an engine for Bing. Alternatively they could be just improving the ability of LLMs to do search, targeting future uses in agentic applications.
There is no way to SEO the entire corpus of human knowledge. ChatGPT is very good for gleaning facts that are hard to surface in today's garbage search engines.
