https://twitter.com/curdled_up/status/1598802701214588928?s=...
In fact, it appears you can still convince the underlying model to browse the web, but if you do, the UI displays an error (the model output doesn't explain to you it's refusing, rather, the UI draws a big X and displays an out-of-band error in red text). I'm guessing that's a server error from OpenAI shutting down their puppeteer cluster or whatever ChatGPT was using to browse. That's what I meant by pulling the plug.
OpenAI even openly advertises this ability[1]. It's likely WebGPT's abilities from a year ago were folded into ChatGPT, but they don't want to expose that ability to the public just yet.