OpenAI announced Monday that it is rolling out ChatGPT-powered Internet search for all users, stepping up competition with incumbent search engine giant Google.
The San Francisco-based tech firm extended its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying customers.
According to OpenAI, with the new public feature, users can now get “fast, timely answers” with links to web sources, a functionality that has traditionally relied on standard search engines.
The upgrade enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the web, echoing Google search results.
“We’re bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT,” OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil said in a video posted on YouTube.
“This means it will be available globally on every platform you use ChatGPT on.”
Examples of the new interface shown by OpenAI resemble search results provided by Google and Google Maps, albeit without the clutter of ads.
They also appeared on the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by presenting the sources cited in the answer.
“We’re really just testing the ChatGPT you know best with the latest information from the web,” ChatGPT Search Product Leader Adam Fry said in the video.
“We’re rolling it out to millions of users starting today.”
Instead of launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT.
Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually through the web search icon.
Since their launch, data on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude has been limited by time cutoffs, so the responses they provided were not up-to-date.
In contrast, both Google and Microsoft combine AI-generated answers with web results.
The addition of online search to ChatGPT will raise further questions about the startup’s link to Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, as it seeks to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google. has been
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, has steered his company into becoming an Internet powerhouse.
It successfully valued the company at $157 billion in a recent round of fundraising that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based Softbank and AI chipmaker Nvidia as investors.
Attracting new customers with search engine capabilities will increase the company’s computing needs and costs, which are already high.