ChatGPT Search Now Free For All. Here’s Why You Should Try It

OpenAI announced today that ChatGPT Search is now available, for free, for all with an OpenAI account. Previously it was only available for paying users behind a subscription paywall. OpenAI says it has recently rolled out changes to make it faster and better, in addition to a real-time interactive voice experience.

“We rolled out search about two months ago for our paid users,” says Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI. “I can’t imagine ChatGPT without search now: I use it so often.”

ChatGPT Search is available globally on every platform, including mobile apps, desktop apps, and web access.

Searching in ChatGPT is exactly the same as asking ChatGPT any other question. ChatGPT will know which queries require an answer with up-to-date information from the web, and answer based on near real-time information. There’s also an explicit button to force ChatGPT to search the web, but I’ve been using ChatGPT Search for a couple of months now and I’ve never felt the need for that button.

You will need a ChatGPT account and will need to be logged into ChatGPT in order to access the web search product for free.

It’s important to note that there are challenges associated with searching the web via an AI system built on a large language model (LLM). LLMs don’t necessarily understand your question or the nature of reality: they are essentially probabilistic engines that return likely answers, but do sometimes hallucinate or just return wrong information.

In my experience, however, ChatGPT returns excellent answers for most of my day-to-day queries. In addition, I will often request that it show sources for the information it returns, so that I can double check a source and ensure that I’m getting correct information. In my informal testing, ChatGPT beat Google Search. One of the reasons: Google Search is now plastered with paid placements, ads, sponsorships, and links to other Google services, making it a much less usable and less friendly tool than it used to be.

(Of course, now that ChatGPT is opening up to non-paying users, we can expect some kind of advertising monetization model to follow shortly.)

Very quickly, over the past few months, I’ve turned to ChatGPT for almost all my searching requirements. I still occasionally access DuckDuckGo for a few queries, and very occasionally Google, but ChatGPT Search appears to cover 95% of my needs.

You can also set ChatGPT as your default search engine via a control in the ChatGPT interface, and you can use ChatGPT as a navigation resource. OpenAI demonstrated by showing a search for travel websites: direct links show up first, followed by more contextualized information.

For business search, ChatGPT will show a visual listing of options, such as restaurants, with ratings, expected cost, and hours of operation. There’s also a map view to show where they all are.

Because ChatGPT understands context, you can refine searches by simply continuing to add elements—like restaurants with open-air seating—without repeating your initial query. That makes it more useful than standard Google search, although Google’s AI engine, Gemini, will likely do the same.

OpenAI also hyped a coming real-time audio experience where you can simply chat with ChatGPT as if you were talking to a friend, adding more information and getting more insight as you go. Realistically, this always seems to take longer than a standard query-type interface, but clearly this is helpful when you’re driving or have your hands otherwise occupied.