ChatGPT Search is OpenAI's built-in web-search mode inside ChatGPT that answers natural-language questions with fast, timely answers and inline links to the web sources it used. It is available to everyone in supported regions — including the free tier, with no signup required — so it works both as a free answer engine and as a premium research tool for ChatGPT Plus, Business, and Enterprise subscribers.
What it is
ChatGPT Search blends ChatGPT's conversational interface with live web results. Instead of returning a list of blue links, it reads across current web pages and composes a direct answer, then shows the sources it drew from. OpenAI positions it for questions where freshness matters — sports scores, news, stock quotes and other fast-moving topics — that previously required leaving the chat for a traditional search engine.
How it answers and cites sources
Answers include inline links to the underlying sources, such as news articles and blog posts, and a Sources button below each response opens a sidebar listing the full references. Under the hood, ChatGPT Search leverages third-party search providers plus content from OpenAI's direct partners; websites are surfaced through OpenAI's dedicated OAI-SearchBot crawler. The search experience runs on a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using synthetic-data techniques that distil outputs from OpenAI's o1-preview reasoning model.
Pricing and access
ChatGPT Search is freemium. The free version of ChatGPT is available to everyone, and ChatGPT search itself became available to all users — no signup required — in regions where ChatGPT is offered. Paid plans are priced per user per month, starting with Plus at $20/month, which adds expanded access and higher limits; Business and Enterprise are priced per seat for teams. For developers, the same web-search capability is exposed through the OpenAI API via the web search tool in the Responses API (and, in some cases, Chat Completions), so answers with sourced citations can be generated programmatically.
Privacy and data use
By default, OpenAI may use consumer ChatGPT conversations to improve its models, but it offers an opt-out: once you opt out, new conversations are not used to train OpenAI's models. Teams that need conversations excluded from training by default typically use Business or Enterprise plans. Anyone relying on ChatGPT Search for sensitive queries should confirm the current data-control settings for their plan.
Who it's for
ChatGPT Search fits anyone who already works inside ChatGPT and wants current, cited web answers in the same window — from casual users checking news or prices for free, to professionals on Plus who want higher usage and faster responses, to developers wiring web-grounded answers into their own apps through the API. Because the free tier requires no signup and returns linked sources, it is also a low-friction way to test whether an AI answer engine can replace some of your day-to-day search queries before paying for a subscription.