Yes. An external search engine is still there, for now.

But the user doesn't necessarily know anything about that, and they don't necessarily care.

If/when the time is reached when external search engines are no longer present in the LLM loop, it seems likely that regular folks won't even notice this shift. As long as the answer-making machine keeps making answers, they won't have any reason to pay attention to this kind of back-end minutiae at all.