sure both pagerank and llms can modelled as marlov chains, but the working and output of these models is very different. it’s disingenuous to state that google used llms and their precursors since the beginning. their precursors maybe but they are very different beasts.

as for the complaints, for me a big problem of their use in search engines is that they often hide the sources of the summary they provide and disincentivize people from clicking through to the source sites. This is very much a new problem that didn’t exist before google included output from generative models