> Am I the only one using LLMs as if they were a search engine?

I quite like the search-first LLMs like Gemini and Copilot for this reason. They give you links which you can use to verify the output and seem to be less prone to directing you to SEO spam than Google Search/Bing.

Although I do partly think that search engines today are delivering poor performance compared to what they delivered historically so LLMs are benefiting from that.