Search is ad-influenced already, but there's still signal under the noise.
Adding a chat front end is just going to lower the SNR, because ChatGPT has no idea what facts are or how to check them.
Unfortunately it's also the main attraction for corporate revenue generation. You can sell stuff conversationally. Woo hoo. These systems are going to turn into automated used car sales bots which use persuasion techniques to steer users towards a sale.
From the user POV the main attraction is the prospect of a kind of universal summarising WikiBot and bureaucratic paperwork automator.
Those are fundamentally different domains.
Users have been pretty relaxed about being manipulated and distracted by social media and covert PR/sales/influencer operations, so there's going to be a huge market for the bad stuff.
But it's just corporate noise, as it always is. The real value will come from processed search in the sense of automated teaching and intelligence augmentation.
Unfortunately there's not where most of the research will go. It's not going to become common until LLMs are taught to fact check with high reliability, and the cost of entry is low enough for that to be offered as a service.
Meanwhile - yes, exactly: ads disguised as search results.