At that point you may as well have used the search engine in the first place.

I was going to respond to this but I think you did so yourself:

I have asked searchy type questions and got some interesting links back which I probably wouldn’t have found on a normal web search with the terms I was using

I think they work as supplements and not replacements. As any tool, they have their use and (for me) can enhance my searching. But I would not replace it with only LLM. (Altough I have never had any great luck with ChatGPT and links, they never work - as in ChatGPT give me an anchor element without any link. It’s better at providing me search terms and concepts to look up for what I need.)