It's not even a good search engine. I was constantly asking for sources, so I figured I would just add it to the "Customize ChatGPT" to always include the source when possible.

Giving instructions to a model seems to be a monkey's paw simulator. Yeah ok, it always gives me a little section down the bottom with sources now, but they are either unclickable "links" (they are stylized as links but aren't a hyperlink), a fabricated URL (the page doesn't exist and never did according to Internet Archive) or just completely nonsensical and have no relation to the material.

I've experienced all of these today using ChatGPT 4o.

Yeah, source URLs have always been hopeless to get out of ChatGPT. I suspect not because it couldn't, but because they wouldn't: citing sources would open up for copyright infringement lawsuits. So it makes sense that source URLs can be available when quoting the Atlantic now: they have signed the deal and made the pact and can't come complaining.

In the current LLM tech if you need sources reliably, you need to start with search first and then summarise that with LLMs.

ChatGPT without web browsing skips the search part and ends up hallucinating URLs

+1 exactly right, I believe.

Perplexity comes close to what I want, but having a superior product does not, unfortunately, guarantee that they will stay in business.

Perplexity even gives real time status information that it is first searching the web,

as weird as it sounds, tiktok is probably a better search engine for people on that platform from what i understand.