The team behind ChatGPT announced prototype “SearchGPT”, as LLM-driven chat increasingly takes on traditional web search
OpenAI has recently unveiled SearchGPT, described as a ‘prototype of new AI search features’. Currently available on waitlist, the announcement of SearchGPT has generated significant discussion around the positioning of AI conversational search from the Microsoft-backed leader in AI, as a potential competitor to dominance of Google search.
SearchGPT’s emergence follows a clear trend towards AI-driven search experiences. Platforms like Perplexity AI have already gained traction demonstrating the potential of conversational search, defined as a format where users interact with search results in a more natural, dialogue-based format. Perplexity’s UX has even come to in some ways lead the industry, as giants in the search & AI space like Google & OpenAI come to integrate similar design decisions in their own products. This shift to search indicates a larger technological trend that’s likely to proliferate across all industries: the increasing turn to AI agents as user’s first point of contact online.
The launch of SearchGPT isn’t the only movement in the growing shift to AI search. Apple Intelligence, driven in part by ChatGPT, will be debuting on new iPhones in the coming months, integrating AI input at the user level. Likewise, Microsoft has taken significant steps to integrate Bing with AI functionality at all levels and the introduction of ‘CoPilot+ PCs’, similarly introducing LLM-driven tools across their OS.
While OpenAI has described SearchGPT as a prototype, it is evident that the company is exploring ways to integrate its advanced language models into a search engine format. Despite SearchGPT being reported as a move into search, OpenAI’s ChatGPT itself has already undergone significant transformations towards a “Google”-like experience in previous months, most significantly removing a login barrier for ChatGPT usage in favor of a more open, search-engine-like interface. This suggests a strategic shift towards providing a more accessible and user-friendly experience.
SearchGPT’s development highlights the rapid evolution of the search engine landscape. As AI technology continues to advance, we can expect to see further innovations in how users interact with information online.
The rise of AI-driven search engines presents both opportunities and challenges for content owners. There’s near infinite demand for high-quality data that can be accessed and processed by AI models. Likewise, concerns about data scraping and unauthorized use of content are now more prominent than ever: traditional web search is an ads-based model, and solving monetization for AI endpoints is more relevant now than ever.
Dappier is enabling content owners to monetize their data, by transforming proprietary content into an AI-ready data model in just a few clicks. By creating a RAG API from your data and letting you license that data within Dappier Marketplace, Dappier empowers publishers to permission the distribution and usage of their data in the AI ecosystem.
