This is why I am so excited about the way GPT-5 uses its search tool.

GPT-4o and most other AI-assisted search systems in the past worked how you describe: they took the top 10 search results and answered uncritically based on those. If the results were junk the answer was too.

GPT-5 Thinking doesn't do that. Take a look at the thinking trace examples I linked to - in many of them it runs a few searches, evaluates the results, finds that they're not credible enough to generate an answer and so continues browsing and searching.

That's why many of the answers take 1-2 minutes to return!

I frequently see it dismiss information from social media and prefer to go to a source with a good reputation for fact-checking (like a credible newspaper) instead.