Information-gathering agents are an evolution of Google Alerts. Beyond spotting changes, they can make sense of them, too.

… Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience.

Web publishers should honestly just block googlebot at this point. Why should they provide credibility to whatever Google's stochastic parrot hallucinates if Google won't even give them any kickback?

So what do we search with instead of Google? There isn’t a lot of choice. There’s various flavours of Google or Bing.

Microsoft deprecated their Bing API back in August, instead telling people to use some Azure AI thing. DDG and the like weren't affected because they have contracts, but I can't imagine they'll be renewed.