OpenAI is ‘going to build a search product’

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:

• “They have said that they’re going to build a search product. They have not launched the search product, but they have said they would build it. We have allowed them to include The Atlantic in their search product.”

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.

• While this is good news for those large publishers, it could mean that smaller publishers will struggle to earn prominent citations on OpenAI’s search product.

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:

• “That’s the bet. There are a lot of people out there who are like, ‘Well, OpenAI’s search doesn’t work.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, AI search doesn’t work right now. It doesn’t work very well. AI is good for a lot of things. It’s not good for search.’ That means that Google search traffic is not going to go away for a while. Once AI is good at search, that’s when Google regular Ten Blue Link search traffic goes away. … I do think that AI search will start to work.
• “Over time, the AI companies will put many engineers on this problem, and they will, I think, figure out how to solve search. So when that happens, it’ll be a partial replacement for Google… Do I think that three years from now we will have as much search traffic from Perplexity, OpenAI, all of their competitors as we do right now from Google? Absolutely not. But will we have some? I sure hope so.”

Dig deeper. Is ChatGPT the Google Search killer we’ve been expecting?