OpenAI didn’t launch its heavily rumored search product earlier this year, but it’s coming. This was confirmed in a new interview with The Atlantic’s CEO Nicholas Thompson.
The quote. ChatGPT search could become “an important way that people navigate the internet,” so it would be “better for us to be in it than to not be in it, and also to help shape it than not help shape it,” Thompson told The Verge. He also said:
Why we care. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made clear he wants to disrupt the search paradigm via a new search product that combines web search plus large language models (LLMs). ChatGPT already offers an impressive “browse mode” to search the web that got really good following the arrival of GPT-4o.
Google challenger? ChatGPT “search” remains quite limited for several query types. However, ChatGPT set a new traffic record in June, attracting 2.9 billion visits, according to Similarweb. This was a 96% increase, year-over-year.
Strategic partnerships. If The Atlantic has given OpenAI permission to be included in the ChatGPT search product, I’d bet good money that many of OpenAI’s other partners are doing the same.
AI search future. Thompson had some interesting things to say about where he sees AI search going. He shared his thoughts on whether OpenAI search could become a reliable traffic referrer:
Dig deeper. Is ChatGPT the Google Search killer we’ve been expecting?