India, Nov. 9 -- Chatbots and search engines may both aim to deliver accurate answers, but a new study shows that they operate in strikingly different ways. While Google's search results are driven by ranking and visibility, AI chatbots appear to look far beyond the most popular pages on the internet.

Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (via Tom's Guide) examined how Google's search engine compared with Google's AI Overviews, Gemini 2.5, and GPT-4o's web-based results. They tested a range of queries, from political questions and factual information to product recommendations, to see where each system sourced its answers.

The findings revealed that AI chatbots often collect data from ...