ChatGPT has launched a search engine, breaking into the market that for decades has been dominated by—and synonymous with—Google.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced “ChatGPT Search” on Thursday. This version of the popular chatbot will let users get the latest information available on the internet.
Many of the results to queries appear like those one would find on a standard Google search. For example, looking up “Chinese food” yields a list of reviews for nearby restaurants, while a search for advice about a vacation to Costa Rica produces travel blogs and hotel listings. In addition, much of the focus is on the tool’s ability to provide real-time information, just as a search engine does, for queries users want to know right away and which can change at a moment's notice—sports scores, stock prices, and the weather.
The tool then summarizes that information and cites where it came from. To prepare for the launch, OpenAI secured several agreements with media companies like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Vox to allow for their content to be included in its search results.
During a public Q&A on Reddit for the launch of ChatGPT Search, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hailed it as an improvement on current search formats.
“For many queries, I find it to be a way faster/easier way to get the information I'm looking for,” Altman said. “I think we'll see this especially for queries that require more complex research. I also look forward to a future where a search query can dynamically render a custom web page in response!”
An OpenAI spokesperson said ChatGPT Search aims to simplify the process of searching for information online by using ChatGPT’s natural language processing skills and providing users with access to reputable sources. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
ChatGPT Search uses other search engines on the backend to power its search results. One of those is Bing, the search engine run by Microsoft, which is one of OpenAI’s biggest investors, OpenAI vice president of engineering Srinivas Narayanan said in a comment during the Reddit Q&A. OpenAI has not released the names of the other search engines it works with. The OpenAI spokesperson said ChatGPT Search will use a mix of search technologies to deliver its results.
ChatGPT is not the only company to try and rival Google with an AI-powered search engine. The Jeff Bezos-backed startup Perplexity bills itself as an AI search engine. (Fortune and Perplexity have a revenue-sharing agreement for revenue generated from search results that feature the publication’s articles.) Google also uses its Gemini large language model for its own search results, to summarize content that would have ordinarily appeared within the links it lists as search results.
ChatGPT has made some very marginal progress in chipping away at Google’s roughly 91% market share of the search engine market. A survey of 1,300 people conducted in September by investment firm Evercore found that 8% of respondents chose ChatGPT over Google as their search engine of choice, an increase from 1% in June.
While progress may be slow, and a single survey is not reflective of the entirety of the market trends shaping Google’s $175 billion search advertising business, it is a rather notable development given that Google’s position was dominant it became a verb. Google is such an immovable force that even an effort last February by Microsoft to use ChatGPT to enhance Bing’s search results—considered a major differentiating factor then—resulted in less than one percentage point of market share gain. It now appears that Microsoft and OpenAI have reversed their strategy, using Bing to power ChatGPT rather than the reverse.
Despite those tortoise-paced gains, Google still dwarfs its competitors. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, doesn’t release exact numbers for its search queries but they are in the billions per month. Even without the specific figures, they are significantly higher than the amount of users ChatGPT and Perplexity have. In August, ChatGPT said it had 200 million weekly users, roughly 800 million a month. While Perplexity had 10 million monthly active users as of February, according to the New York Times, a number that is rather impressive for a startup but pales in comparison to Google’s stature.
Nonetheless, the industry-wide sentiment in Silicon Valley is that AI will change the nature of search engines. How exactly that happens though remains to be seen, even by some of AI’s major players like ChatGPT. When a Reddit user asked OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil about differences between AI-powered search and the old-school version, he said it was still early days.
“The product just launched today so there's a lot to figure out still about where search will be similar and where it will be different in an AI world. Would love any feedback you have!,” Weil wrote on Reddit.
