ChatGPT’s OpenAI search engine is now operational.

It just announced an update to allow real-time information for paying subscribers and waitlist users within the conversations themselves. This system will smoothly embed into the ChatGPT interface, automatically opening up web results if the nature of queries requires it. Users can also activate web searches themselves, if they wish.

This is significant, as ChatGPT can now catch up on a competitive gap that has existed between it and competitors such as Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, both of which have had the leading edge of real-time access to internet information in their AI-assisted conversations for quite a while.

To show the new capability, Adam Fry, the lead of the search team for ChatGPT at OpenAI, searched for information about Apple’s stock. It returned an interactive graph about stock performance, details about upcoming earnings announcements, and news articles, complete with clickable citations that transport users to the original sources of that information.

The users of ChatGPT will, on each of its platforms, such as iOS and Android mobile apps, a desktop application on macOS, and another one on Windows, be able to access this search functionality. This feature, along with an advanced search model, GPT-4o, functions to return appropriate and correct results.

Real-time searching launches as big tech companies race to improve AI-powered search. For example, Meta is working on an AI search tool of its own, while Google is expanding its AI overview feature to more than 100 countries—a wider trend of stitching artificial intelligence into search operations. One of the beauties of trying ChatGPT out is that there are no ads or promoted queries to mess things up, which could be one selling factor for people wanting a clean, uncomplicated search against what’s available from Google Search.

Considerations are to be made that operating AI-powered search services is more costly compared to managing traditional search functionalities. As of this stage, it is not yet known how OpenAI could afford to pay for the feature for users accessing it for free. Free users may find limits on how often they can use the latest model to make searches to control the usage.

But many of the AI search services are in various states of litigation, with organizations like News Corp. and The New York Times alleging that companies like Perplexity are committing widespread copyright violations. OpenAI has forged at least some partnerships with media organizations in the last year, including relationships with Hearst, Condé Nast, Axel Springer, and News Corp. With these partners, there will be more control over how their content shows up in ChatGPT, but by default, they are not given any type of preference in placement within the search results, so the playing field is level with every content provider.

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