Were you not already checking the validity of search results? Because Google's top few results I don't think were ever immune to "hallucination" where the top results happen to be garbage. It's where "don't trust everything you read on the internet" came from.
So I think the only thing that really needs to happen is just blindly trust the AI like you were apparently doing with early Google. I suspect however that you were gut checking Google which you can still do with any AI search that cites its sources.
You really are missing the experience of what google offered for their first decade, when pagerank seemed revolutionary in terms of filtering out spam and 101-level SEO tricks. We had working search engines for a while, and they were taken from us by, first, the providers in seeking greater ad revenue, and second, the AI floggers who want to exploit our now lowered expectations.
All you're doing here is justifying your lowered expectations.
So I think the only thing that really needs to happen is just blindly trust the AI like you were apparently doing with early Google. I suspect however that you were gut checking Google which you can still do with any AI search that cites its sources.