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

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

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

ChatGPT Search fills the competitive gap against Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, which have already been plugged into their respective search engines for a while now. Many users already prefer ChatGPT over Google Search, which has become cluttered with ads and increasingly filled with low-quality, spammy content. Until now, ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff for newer models was October 2023. Now, with real-time search, ChatGPT returns up-to-date information, thanks to its media partnerships, for weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.

When you search with ChatGPT search, you’ll get the traditional conversational responses, with a button directing you to a list of sources. When you click on the sources, you’re presented with a familiar-looking search engine format with headlines and links to each story.

citations show up in the sidebar in traditional search engine format.
Credit: Screenshot: Mashable / OpenAI

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