OpenAI’s search engine is now live in ChatGPT

ChatGPT is officially an AI-powered web search engine. The company is enabling real-time information in conversations for paying customers (as well as SearchGPT waitlist users) today, with free, enterprise, and education users gaining access in the coming weeks.

Rather than launching as a separate product, web search will be integrated into ChatGPT's existing interface. The feature determines when to tap on web results based on a query, though users can also manually trigger web searches. ChatGPT's web search integration finally closes a significant competitive gap with rivals like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, which have long offered real-time internet access in their AI conversations.

In a pre-launch demo, OpenAI's ChatGPT search lead, Adam Fry, demonstrated the feature by searching for Apple's stock and any relevant news. In turn, it displayed news articles with an interactive stock graph, upcoming earnings information, and clickable quotes linking to the original sources. There's also a sources sidebar that lets users scroll through a list of relevant websites. In the second example, Fry searched for Italian restaurants in San Francisco, which returned an interactive map with dropped pins for recommended restaurants. In both examples, Fry asked follow-up questions to improve the result (such as finding restaurants that are "more casual and neighborhood-like").

The new search functionality will be available on all ChatGPT platforms: iOS, Android, and desktop apps for macOS and Windows. Fry said the search functionality was built with a "blend of search technologies," including Microsoft's Bing. The company wrote in a blog on Thursday that the underlying search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o. It was originally released to 10,000 test users in July as a prototype called SearchGPT, and we reported back in May that OpenAI was aggressively trying to attract Google employees for its own search team.

Prior to this update, ChatGPT's knowledge was limited to a cutoff between 2021 and 2023, depending on the model. OpenAI spokesperson Nico Felix said that while live search is active, the company will continue to refresh its training data to "ensure our users always have access to the latest advancements" but that it is "separate" from the training of the company's models.

The launch comes at a time when AI-powered search is becoming popular among tech giants. Meta is reportedly developing its own AI search solution, while Google recently expanded its AI Observation feature to over 100 countries. When asked about the timing coinciding with Alphabet's earnings on Tuesday (which showed that Q3 search revenue was $49.4 billion), Fry said the release was scheduled independently.

This is an obvious reason a user might choose ChatGPT instead of Google Search: there's no clutter of ads or promoted queries pinned at the top. While Google makes a lot of money from advertising in search results, Fry said there are currently “no plans” for advertising in ChatGPT. Still, AI-powered search is more expensive to operate than traditional search, and it’s not yet clear how OpenAI will fund it for free users. Felix said free users will have “some limitations on using our latest search model.” Several AI search services are also facing lawsuits. News Corp. and The New York Times have filed suit against AI-powered search startup Perplexity, with the former accusing it of engaging in “largely free” and “rampant” copyright infringement. The New York Times has also sued OpenAI for allegedly using the media company’s content to train its big language models. When asked how OpenAI is going to avoid even more scrutiny, Fry pointed to the company’s news partnerships. (The Verge's parent company, Vox Media, partners with OpenAI.)

"We're working very closely with all of those partners to understand how to really use that content responsibly and help get the best results for publisher partners as well," Fry said, adding that any publisher is able to easily opt out of OpenAI's web crawler. This web crawler will also not bypass paywalls, he said.

OpenAI has secured a number of media partnerships over the past year, including big names like Hearst, Condé Nast, Axel Springer and News Corp. While Fry says those partners will get more "control" over how their content is shown in ChatGPT, they won't automatically be given higher priority in queries.