OpenAI operates its own crawlers and also licenses search results (Bing, as part of their longstanding relationship with MSFT); it's undisclosed what the exact "mix" is that comprises responses.
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In terms of free vs. paid, the free plan is heavily restricted. In the response I shared it spent 75 seconds in "thinking" mode. For more comprehensive reports they have a "Deep research" feature that can run for 5-10 minutes.
That increase does tend to improve the quality of responses, better attribution of claims to sources, etc. It does not obviate the need to verify, of course.
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