Except when search engines bury the thing you're obviously looking for under an entire page of sponsored ads, then that convenience argument starts to not hold up as well...
Ad-sponsored models are going to be dead as soon as people realize they can't trust output.
And because the entire benefit to LLM search is the convenience of removing a human-in-the-loop step (scanning the search results), there won't be a clear insertion/distinction point for ads without poisoning the entire output.
Example from my work. Many of our customers will search for our company name in order to find the login page. I've watched them do this over screen share.
When they do that, the top search result is an ad slot. The second search result is our login page.
We buy ads against out own company name so that we can be the ad slot as well as the first result. Otherwise a competitor who buys ads against our company name could be the top slot.
Those who can afford, buy unbiased.
Those who cannot, accept biased free services.
I suppose that's Google's hope for how future search turns out.
Over time subscription models will converge to subscription with advertisements. Like newspapers did.
Ads xor payment, or else you can fuck all the way off.
What you don't get with pay TV
Originally for cable, but then you got ads with cable.
Then for streaming, but then you got ads with streaming.
Physical DVDs? Ads.
Paid Roku device? Ads.
Paid windows installation? Ads.