OpenAI’s Google challenger is finally here.
The company on Thursday launched ChatGPT Search, an evolution of the SearchGPT prototype it unveiled this summer. Built into OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, ChatGPT Search is designed to give “timely answers” to questions, OpenAI says, drawing from a range of online sources.
Powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, ChatGPT Search serves up information and photos from the web — like sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more — along with links to relevant sources, at which point you can ask follow-up questions to refine an ongoing search.
ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the new web search icon.
Responses have both in-line and sidebar attribution to news publishers and other data sources OpenAI has licensing deals with. For example, a search for weekend events in San Francisco might pull up a summary sourced from local news websites, while a follow-up question about restaurant suggestions will show a list of local options.
Election results-related queries will be directed to sources like AP and Reuters, OpenAI says.
ChatGPT Plus and Team users will get access to ChatGPT Search on mobile and the web to start, while OpenAI’s enterprise and educational customers will get ChatGPT Search in the coming weeks, followed by free users.
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OpenAI has also released a browser extension to make ChatGPT Search the default search engine in Chrome.
OpenAI says that it plans to keep improving search, particularly in areas like shopping and travel, and leverage its o1 “reasoning” models for “deeper research.” The company’s also planning to bring ChatGPT Search to its Advanced Voice Mode feature, as well as to logged-out users of ChatGPT.
Some publishers have protested AI-generated overviews like ChatGPT Search and Google’s AI Overviews, saying that they threaten to cannibalize traffic to the sites from which they source their information. One study found that AI Overviews could negatively affect about 25% of publisher traffic due to the de-emphasis on article links.
OpenAI says it incorporated feedback from publisher partners about how ChatGPT Search decides which articles are most relevant to a query, as well as determining the summary length and quotations for articles.
