Search used to be a list of links. Now the top of the page is often a block of AI-written text that summarizes sources you cannot see. If that change has annoyed you, you are not alone, and there are ways back to plain links.
Why this happened
AI summaries keep people on the search page instead of sending them off to other sites. That is useful for the engine's business and occasionally useful for you on simple questions. The trouble is that the summary sits between you and the source, and it can be confidently wrong in ways that are hard to spot.
The problems with an AI answer on top
A summary flattens nuance, hides which source said what, and adds load time while it generates. For anything where accuracy matters, you end up scrolling past the AI block to find the real links anyway. The convenience is real for trivial lookups and thin for everything else.
How to get plain links back
On some engines you can switch the web tab or use a setting to suppress AI overviews, though these options move around and are not always reliable. The more durable fix is to use an engine that never generates AI prose in the first place.
Bare does exactly that. It shows a list of links and, when it is genuinely confident, a single quick fact pulled straight from the index with a source attached. There is no AI summary, no generated essay, and nothing standing between you and the page you actually wanted.
Plain by default, not by toggle
The advantage of an engine that is plain by design is that you never have to hunt for a setting that quietly disappears in the next update. The page is just links. If the modern AI-first results page wears you out, that simplicity is the whole point of Bare.