After months of speculation about its search ambitions, OpenAI has unveiled SearchGPT, a “prototype” search engine that could eventually help the company steal some of Google’s lucrative business.
OpenAI said the new tool would help users find what they're looking for faster and easier by using generative AI to curate links and answer user questions in a conversational tone. SearchGPT could eventually be integrated into OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chatbot. In addition to broader web search, the search engine will use information provided by publishers who have agreements that give OpenAI access to their data.
Kayla Wood, a spokesperson for OpenAI, declined to provide a demo of SearchGPT or an interview about the new tool for WIRED, but did confirm that the company has already opened up access to anonymous partners and publishers and has improved aspects of the search engine based on their feedback.
Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, was one of the first companies to release a generative AI search engine to the public when it launched an AI-powered version of Bing in 2023 that relied on OpenAI’s large language models. That Microsoft AI search experience has since been rebranded as Copilot.
Since then, multiple competitors, such as Google and Perplexity, have launched their own AI search experiences for users. Google’s AI Overviews offer AI-generated summaries of articles, often at the top of news results. OpenAI’s SearchGPT is more like Perplexity’s approach, with the chatbot providing an accompanying list of relevant links and allowing the user to ask follow-up questions.
After OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, early adopters saw the chatbot’s ability to mine and summarize information from the web as a potential replacement for conventional web search. But the shortcomings of large language models make chatbots imperfect search tools. The models use training data that is often months or years old, and when they’re not sure of an answer, they fabricate facts.
Microsoft’s early efforts with Bing were far from successful, with the AI-powered search engine producing strange, inappropriate, and incorrect answers. Bing’s market share grew only slightly after the overhaul.
When Google added AI Overviews to search results in May, the company quickly ran into reliability issues, such as recommending people put glue on pizza. OpenAI’s SearchGPT can use a generative AI approach called retrieval augmented generation, which is an industry standard for AI search and is designed to reduce the number of hallucinations in chatbot responses. Using a RAG approach, the AI tool references familiar information, such as a favorite news website, while generating the output and feeding it back to the source of the data.
There’s also the issue of potential copyright infringement. Perplexity in particular has been criticized by publications including WIRED for copying aspects of original journalism with its AI search tool and ignoring requests not to pull content from some websites. In OpenAI’s blog post, the company notes its commitment to publishers: “SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches.” Multiple companies, including Vox Media, The Atlantic, News Corp, and the Financial Times, have all signed licensing agreements with OpenAI this year.
