There's a new AI-backed search engine in town. But can it stand up to Google's decades-long hold on internet searches?

ChatGPT is officially an AI-powered web search engine. The company is enabling real-time information in conversations for paid subscribers today (along with SearchGPT waitlist users), with free, enterprise, and education users gaining access in the coming weeks.

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled a new ChatGPT search engine, directly competing with Microsoft Bing and Google’s core search business.

SearchGPT was initially launched in July as a prototype, from which OpenAI planned to integrate the best features with ChatGPT later. OpenAI has collected that feedback and implemented it into its search experience, claiming it brought "the best of the SearchGPT experience" into the chatbot.

OpenAI has embedded a search engine in its popular ChatGPT chatbot, as tech companies compete to use artificial intelligence to improve search results.

OpenAI has added search engine capabilities to ChatGPT, challenging Google's web search dominance. However, it's only available to paid users.

ChatGPT search will draw from news media OpenAI made deals with. OpenAI says “context” will differentiate it from Google Search.

OpenAI has partnered with a number of news organizations so its search engine will be able to pull from these companies’ content for its SearchGPT.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Mashable, "We don’t have any plans for ads" with ChatGPT Search. The statement follows Thursday's launch of the much anticipated web-browsing capability. ChatGPT Search works off of OpenAI's GPT-4o model and uses third-party search and content from its media partners to surface real-time information.

As a Halloween treat for ChatGPT users (and a trick for the likes of Google and Bing), OpenAI has turned its AI chatbot into an internet search engine. As the company explains in a blog post, ChatGPT is now better than ever at searching the web and capable of providing fast and timely answers to your questions with links to relevant sources.

OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT inside ChatGPT last week and I’ve made the switch completely from Google in a large part because it removes all the clutter of a modern Google result page.