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OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT Search to all users, with Maps and Advanced Voice features coming up

Free users of ChatGPT will now be able to make it the default search engine within a web browser of their choice.

In the past few months, OpenAI has struck several content licensing deals with major news publishers. (Express Image/FreePik)

Anyone with a ChatGPT account can now use it to search the internet. OpenAI announced on Monday, December 16, that access to ChatGPT Search is available for all users through the mobile app as well as the desktop version of the AI platform. Previously, only users who had subscribed to ChatGPT Plus or its Team plan could use the AI-powered search function that was initially called SearchGPT.

Users will also be able to set up ChatGPT Search to be the default search engine within the web browser of their choice. OpenAI is also reportedly working on its own web browser to take on Google Chrome.

“We’re also adding maps to ChatGPT in our mobile apps, so you can search for and chat about local restaurants and businesses with up-to-date information,” the company said in a post on X. Advanced Voice Mode will also be integrated with ChatGPT Search over the next week, it added.

Monday’s announcement is part of OpenAI’s “12 Days” Ship-mas event, under which the company has introduced several new products such as its text-to-video generator Sora and a $200 per month subscription package called ChatGPT Pro. There are four more days of announcements by OpenAI left.

While SearchGPT was initially billed to be a separate platform, OpenAI decided to build the AI-powered search functionality into ChatGPT, which is easily one of its most popular AI products with over 300 million weekly users.

In the past few months, OpenAI has struck several content licensing deals with major news publishers such as Associated Press, Reuters, and Condé Nast to primarily train its AI search engine on data from these publications. As a result, ChatGPT Search mainly cites links to these publications in the search results that are pulled up and shown to users.

Also Read | Meta builds AI search engine to cut Google, Bing reliance: Report

However, ChatGPT Search’s ability to attribute sources has been called into question recently. A study by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism copy-pasted 200 quotes from articles posted by a mix of 20 publishers on ChatGPT Search and asked the platform to provide the name of the publication, publication date, and URL. ChatGPT Search failed to accurately provide these results 153 times, as per the researchers.

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“We observed a spectrum of accuracy in the responses: some answers were entirely correct (i.e., accurately returned the publisher, date, and URL of the block quote we shared), many were entirely wrong, and some fell somewhere in between,” the study read.