ChatGPT Search is now live. Here’s how to use it.

OpenAI’s long-awaited ChatGPT search engine is now live.

On Thursday, the company announced ChatGPT Search, framing it as a new ChatGPT feature to “find fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources.” Although it was rumored to be a standalone search engine, ChatGPT Search is integrated into the ChatGPT interface. You can access real-time searches by manually clicking the web search icon, or entering your information and letting ChatGPT decide if it needs to search the web for current results.

ChatGPT Search fills a competitive gap against Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, which have already been linked to their search engines for a while. Many users already prefer ChatGPT to Google Search, which is already full of ads and increasingly full of low-quality, spammy content. Until now, the cut-off for ChatGPT information on new models was October 2023. Now, with real-time search, ChatGPT returns the latest information, thanks to its media relations, on weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.

When you search with ChatGPT search, you will find common chat answers, with a button that directs you to a list of sources. When you click on the sources, you are presented with a search engine format that looks familiar with the titles and links to each story.

citations appear in the sidebar in standard search engine format.
Credit: Screenshot: Mashable / OpenAI

ChatGPT Search is currently available to ChatGPT Plus, ChatGPT Team users and SearchGPT testers, and will be available to ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu users in the next few weeks. OpenAI also shared that it plans to bring ChatGPT Search to Enhanced Voice Mode and free users in the future.