News
The Gist
- AI-enhanced search capabilities. ChatGPT now integrates web search for faster, up-to-date answers, combining AI’s natural language with real-time information.
- Strategic partnerships for content accuracy. Collaborations with news and data providers ensure timely and reliable insights, including sports, stocks, weather, and news updates.
- Source attribution for transparency. Answers include links to original sources, allowing users to delve deeper into the information provided.
OpenAI officially rolled out ChatGPT Search about four months after launching the SearchGPT prototype.
We knew it was coming. We knew marketers were bracing for a potential new content-discoverability paradigm. And now it's here. What does this do for SEO? Will there be a new SEO for AI search on the horizon? So many questions. No hard answers yet.
But you gotta believe: AI search is a compelling use case for content searches — stay within the generative AI application and avoid going on the deep blue-link search in Google. It's been so compelling for users, ChatGPT actually surpassed Microsoft's Bing search engine for traffic, according to data from SimilarWeb.
Still not in Google's world yet, but ChatGPT beating Bing tells you something — and could be a precursor of where consumers end up searching for content and answers via the internet.
"ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before," OpenAI researchers wrote in a blog post out Oct. 31. "You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more. ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon."
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT Search will be available at chatgpt.com, as well as on desktop and mobile apps. All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, have access today. Enterprise and "Edu" will get access in the next few weeks. The company will later roll out to all Free users over the coming months.
New World for Online Content Search?
"We should be nervous because this thing is going to change everything," Luis Fernandez, a CMSWire Contributor and executive director at VML, a global experience agency, told CMSWire about apps like ChatGPT Search in an interview airing on CMSWire TV Nov. 6. "It's not about search. Search is not going to be as important as it was before, because we use search as a means to something else, and now AI is going to give us that extra meaning, or that extra capability. ... It's going to be completely different. What that's going to look like? It's going to be a discovery process."
Related Article: Can OpenAI's SearchGPT Outdo Google?
OpenAI: ChatGPT Search Is Designed to 'Get You to a Better Answer'
OpenAI, in no surprise, is building up its ChatGPT Search capabilities to get you a better answer. Lots of effort. Multiple searches. "Digging through links" (Hello, Google salvo). It's about quality sources and the right kind of information.
"Now, chat can get you to a better answer: Ask a question in a more natural, conversational way, and ChatGPT can choose to respond with information from the web," OpenAI officials said. "Go deeper with follow-up questions, and ChatGPT will consider the full context of your chat to get a better answer for you."
News and data providers are partnering up with OpenAI to deliver content via ChatGPT Search like weather, stocks, sports, news and maps. Searches will include links to sources, such as news articles and blog posts. AI search will be the primary way to access information, one publisher told OpenAI.
"ChatGPT search connects people with original, high-quality content from the web and makes it part of their conversation," OpenAI officials wrote. "By integrating search with a chat interface, users can engage with information in a new way, while content owners gain new opportunities to reach a broader audience. We hope to help users discover publishers and websites, while bringing more choice to search."
Webinar
Sep
25
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Register
Webinar
Sep
25
Call Spoofing Trends Financial Institutions Can't Afford to Ignore
Don't let robocalls sabotage your customer relationships. Learn how to secure your voice channel.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
CX Reality Check: What Your Customers Are Really Thinking
Register now and get the insights you need to not just meet rising expectations, but exceed them.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Content Leaders Collective: What a Good CCMS Actually Looks Like
Discover how content leaders transform clunky systems into growth engines — and why your competitors are ahead.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Hype to High-Impact CX Strategies That Actually Scale
Turn buzzworthy AI and outsourcing trends into measurable CX wins with fresh 2025 data.
Watch Now
We will say it is kinda funny OpenAI takes a shot at "digging through links" in the content search world but some early user interface discoveries on ChatGPT Search shows, well, blue links, on a search for "Yankees Dodgers." The real-time search is appealing, for sure, since earlier models of AI chatbots were in some cases a year or more behind in terms of their content training models.
Related Article: Google vs. SearchGPT: What Marketers Need to Know
OpenAI's GPT-4o Powers ChatGPT Search
ChatGPT Search is a "fine-tuned version of GPT-4o." OpenAI said it's post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview. ChatGPT Search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by OpenAI partners, to provide the information users are looking for.
ChatGPT Search Features:
- Access and Availability: ChatGPT search is accessible to Plus, Team, and SearchGPT waitlist users, with planned rollout for Free, Enterprise, and Edu users.
- Enhanced Search Capability: ChatGPT can search the web directly, offering timely answers with relevant web links without needing a separate search engine.
- Automatic and Manual Search: ChatGPT decides when a query might benefit from web information but also allows manual activation via the web search icon or typing “/” for search.
- Citations and Source Access: Responses using search include inline citations, allowing users to hover over or click citations to view sources.
- Privacy and Data Sharing: General location and disassociated search queries may be shared with third-party providers like Bing to improve search accuracy, as per OpenAI’s privacy policy.
- Image Integration: Some search results may include images, with clickable citations for image sources.
- Browser Integration: Users can set ChatGPT search as their default Chrome search engine through an extension, with Google search accessible using the “!g” command.
"Thanks to feedback from the SearchGPT prototype, we brought the best of the SearchGPT experience into ChatGPT," OpenAI officials said. "We plan to keep improving search, particularly in areas like shopping and travel, and leverage the reasoning capabilities of the OpenAI o1 series to do deeper research. We also plan to bring our new search experience to Advanced Voice and canvas, as well as to Free and logged-out users in the future."
Have a tip to share with our editorial team? Drop us a line:
