The Architecture Behind Web Search in AI Chatbots

AI chatbots perform live web searches using a sophisticated two-stage process that goes far beyond their initial training data. First, the system rewrites a user's question into multiple optimized queries and uses traditional search engines to discover a list of relevant web pages. Instead of reading entire pages, the system then crawls these sites, breaks their content into small passages, and retrieves only the most relevant chunks of text to answer the query. This passage-level retrieval is a major shift from traditional SEO, as a highly relevant paragraph from a lower-ranked site can be chosen over content from a top-ranking page.