Interesting, I had the opposite experience. 5.0 "Thinking" was better than 5.1, but Gemini 3 Pro seems worse than either for web search use cases. It's hallucinating at pretty alarming rates (including making up sources it never actually accessed) for a late 2025 model.

Opus 4.5 has been a step above both for me, but the usage limits are the worst of the three. I'm seriously considering multiple parallel subscriptions at this point.