SearchGPT lands...finally

Since rumors first began in February, many have been speculating about when OpenAI was going to reveal its “ChatGPT-powered search engine”.

Well, that time has come: OpenAI has finally revealed ‘SearchGPT’, an AI search engine, powered by GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o, that many believe could have the power to knock Google off its top spot.

What can SearchGPT do?

OpenAI has tentatively released SearchGPT as a prototype, making it available to just 10,000 test users and publishers (if you fancy giving it a try, you can join the waitlist, here), with plans to integrate the best features into ChatGPT, once the testing period is over.

However, according to reports, SearchGPT is very similar to ChatGPT: Users type in a query and it then scours the web for real-time information, delivering the answer in a concise, visually engaging summary, complete with links to sources. It also gives users the chance to ask follow-up questions and explore related searches.

OpenAI designed and built SearchGPT because they felt “Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results.”

They worked with third-party partners and content feeds to broaden the search results and make them more accurate, and as a result, they believe “that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”

This remains to be seen, of course, but I can’t help but think that the launch of SearchGPT has come at a time when AI search engines are being heavily criticized for plagiarism, inaccuracies, and content cannibalism: Google’s AI Overviews and The BrowserCompany’s Arc Search were recently slammed for producing inaccurate results (including telling users to eat rocks and that cut-off toes will grow back), and Perplexity AI was in hot water for failing to credit, compensate, or attribute news journalists in their AI-generated search summaries. And, there’s a growing concern among website owners that AI search is taking traffic away from their sites.

OpenAI doesn’t seem phased by this, though. Instead, they’re positioning themselves as a more responsible model that will work with publishers and news outlets and give them a way to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features.”

They have assured them that they “are committed to a thriving ecosystem of publishers and creators” and are giving them the chance to opt out of letting GPT scrape their sites for content, without it affecting their visibility in the search results and are insisting that SearchGPT will always “prominently link to publishers, with clear, in-line, named attribution.”