What exactly does Web Search do?

I was thinking of building an agent to help me with my marketing by parsing out information that I typically look for on a lead’s website. I tested the idea out in a playground, and I’m very puzzled by the result. It doesn’t seem to actually visit the website? Or if it does, it isn’t understanding the contact information listed in the footer. When using the same prompt in the regular ChatGPT app, it seems to do a google search and looks for yelp/reddit/etc for information.

  1. How exactly does this work?
  2. Is its intended use only to do general web searches?
  3. How are we meant to do basic scraping operations?