The best way to get the most out of an AI chatbot is verifying its sources and letting it direct you to more robust and useful content regarding the topic. Therefore, AI search engines are a powerful tool for everyday workflows, and, now, accessing ChatGPT Search just got a whole lot easier.
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On Wednesday, OpenAI shared via an X post that ChatGPT Search is now available to everyone, no account needed. All users have to do is visit the ChatGPT standalone site and ChatGPT will automatically search the web when relevant. You can also manually call on its web search capability by clicking on the small globe icon underneath the search bar.
ChatGPT Search, originally launched in October, lets users search the web directly within the ChatGPT interface for timely, up-to-date information, complete with citations linked to sources. There are two big advantages that differentiate it from a traditional search engine: using conversational search queries, and getting a more personalized results page.
With ChatGPT Search, you can enter a fragmented or unorganized sentence that follows your train of thought, and the AI can still understand the meaning of your query by leveraging its natural language processing capabilities. The result is a simplified search experience in which you can spend less time crafting a tailored search query or thinking of specific keywords.
ChatGPT’s conversational text responses answer your questions directly which can also help you save time over traditional search engine results pages which generally require that you click on multiple links and skim sites to find the answer to what you were looking for.
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For example, if you wanted to know what the technical name for a bee humming is, instead of generally searching “bee hums” on Google, you could say something like, “What is the scientific term for the sound a bee makes when it flies around you? It kinda sounds like a hum.”
Of course, those text responses have footnotes which you can click on to visit the original source. If you like the look and experience of a traditional SERP, you can also click on “Sources” underneath your response to see a list of websites. Sites that block OpenAI’s web crawler will not appear in the search results, so you may be missing content from some of your favorite sites.
You can try ChatGPT Search for yourself for free now. You can also compare it to the many AI search engines available on the market for free, which we rounded up for you here.