OpenAI releases a SearchGPT prototype

OpenAI released a prototype of SearchGPT, a search feature that returned direct, conversational answers alongside clearly attributed source links drawn from the live web, rather than the list of ranked links typical of conventional search engines. The company described it as “a temporary prototype” intended to test features it planned eventually to fold into ChatGPT rather than to operate as a standalone product.

Access was limited from the outset: OpenAI opened the prototype to roughly 10,000 waitlisted test users and a group of publishers, saying it wanted feedback before any wider rollout. It also announced a mechanism letting publishers control how their content appeared in SearchGPT results and summaries, an attempt to pre-empt the kind of dispute already under way between AI companies and news organisations over unlicensed use of published material for training and retrieval.

The move was read immediately as a direct challenge to Google’s dominance of web search, coming as regulators in the US and elsewhere were separately pursuing antitrust action against Google’s search business. It also intensified competition with Perplexity, which had built a similar cited-answer search product over the previous year, and with rival labs already racing to attach real-time retrieval to their chatbots.

SearchGPT remained a limited-access prototype for three months. OpenAI folded its functionality directly into ChatGPT as “ChatGPT search” that October, retiring the standalone waitlist and making sourced, live web answers available to all ChatGPT users rather than a small test group — the outcome the July announcement had signalled it was building toward from the start.