OpenAI has just launched its AI search update for ChatGPT. Three months after the company first announced a SearchGPT prototype, OpenAI's vision for the future of AI search is now available to the public.

“We’re focused on making ChatGPT the best place to answer any question, including live information from the web,” says Adam Fry, product lead for search at ChatGPT. Now called “ChatGPT Search” rather than “SearchGPT” by Fry, the feature enters an increasingly crowded and contentious field of AI search options for users – with competition from smaller startups like Perplexity as well as tech giants like Google's search results AI overview. So far in 2024, journalists have criticized both Google and Perplexity's AI search implementations for miscopying aspects of the original work and hallucinating fake information.

Ahead of ChatGPT's search update, OpenAI entered into content licensing deals with several online publishers, including The Atlantic, Vox Media and Condé Nast, the publication's parent company. These deals allow the AI ​​startup to use the work of publishers to train its systems for a fee. (Similar to the firewall between advertising and editorial, business deals have no impact on WIRED's reporting.)

I was quite worried about the repercussions when I first saw my post for WIRED mentioned by ChatGPT in 2023. After spending a few hours testing a pre-launch version of ChatGPT's new AI search, it's clear to me that OpenAI has made significant progress since its first, messier foray into web browsing, with more interactive elements and clearer attribution. I could imagine that a subset of early adopters were really excited about the new ChatGPT search.

With that in mind, the current product needs improvement before it can truly compete with Google's dominance in key search experiences like online shopping. ChatGPT also makes some of the same mistakes as other AI search tools, such as hallucinating and quoting false information. Are you curious to try the update yourself? Here's how to use it and some examples from my first experiences.

How to use ChatGPT's search tool

To try this update immediately, you will need to pay for one of OpenAI's subscriptions. If you use the $20 per month ChatGPT Plus plan or ChatGPT Teams for work, the new search experience should be available now. OpenAI will likely roll this out to users on Enterprise and Edu plans later in November. Free users will have to wait the longest, probably until early next year.

ChatGPT search is based on a custom version of GPT-4o, OpenAI's latest generative model. It is available to users via the ChatGPT website, mobile app (Android, Apple) and web app (Mac, Windows). Although this is a fairly global rollout, users in certain regions, such as the European Union, are not yet able to use the AI ​​search feature.