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AI & Search

ChatGPT Search

SearchGPT | OpenAI Search

Portrait of Robert Klimant, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Robert KlimantCo-founder

What is ChatGPT Search?

ChatGPT Search is a real-time web search feature inside ChatGPT that lets the model retrieve current information and cite the sources it used. Originally launched as SearchGPT in 2024 and rolled into ChatGPT for all users in 2025, it combines OpenAI's models with a live search index. ChatGPT Search returns conversational answers with inline links to the pages it pulled from, instead of a list of ten blue links.

Why it matters

ChatGPT now has hundreds of millions of weekly users who increasingly start their research there instead of on Google. When your buyer asks ChatGPT to compare three vendors in your space, the answer is built from whatever the model can crawl and trust. Get cited, and you are in the consideration set. Get skipped, and you do not exist. The pages that win citations are the ones that answer questions clearly, load fast, and structure information so a model can extract it. The same fundamentals that make a page rank on Google make it citable here — only the audience is now a chat window.

How it works

When a user asks a question that requires fresh information, ChatGPT runs a web search behind the scenes using a partnership with Bing and its own crawlers. It retrieves a set of pages, reads them in real time, and writes an answer grounded in that content with inline source links. Pages that load fast on the first hit, have clean HTML, use clear headings, and contain direct answers near the top get pulled more often. The model also weighs domain authority, recency, and how often the page is referenced elsewhere on the open web. Sites that block GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt do not get cited, which is a deliberate trade some teams make.

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