More than that: what you don’t see is internal iterations of clicks and site reads by tools. Placed into growing chat history, until the AI calls no more tools. Then the billed one-time-fee “search” is context is not a product for you to even use in future lines of inquiry.
Also, despite disallowing results from a particular site, about that site, in the request, and stating the behavior needed in searching, 50% of the citations were directly that site. Search tool behaves little more than a trigger and delivers a googling.
I expect the behavior is tuned to overcome publisher’s potential objections: you never get more than a factual snippet, and there are citations to drive clicks.
You’d have to build your own multi-layered tool if you want an AI simply to be “informed” and not be a pattern parrot: a tool call to an AI that can use the search model and collect the provided search texts, and give them back in a format that isn’t accompanied by demands.