ChatGPT Search is OpenAI's built-in web search inside ChatGPT, launched 31 October 2024. Ask a question, the model browses live web sources, writes one answer, and cites the publishers it pulled from in-line.
Across UC's 146-article Australian corpus audit, 31% of audited sites named ChatGPT and 18% named Perplexity in body copy, but 0% carried a labelled Quick Answer block, the format ChatGPT lifts most cleanly when it cites a source inline.
Before the launch, the answers ChatGPT gave were bounded by its training cut-off, anything newer required leaving the chat to use Google. After the launch, the same conversation handles both. OpenAI announced it as the production version of the SearchGPT prototype and rolled it out to ChatGPT Plus, Team and Enterprise users that day, with free-tier access following over the next months. TechCrunch's launch coverage described it as a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o that draws from a range of online sources and shows both in-line and sidebar attribution to the publishers OpenAI has licensing deals with.
The mechanic that matters for businesses is how it picks sources. OpenAI signed deals with publishers including Reuters, the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, Hearst, Le Monde and News Corp, and queries on news topics route to those first. For the rest, the model picks from the open web based on the same signals Generative Engine Optimisation rewards: a direct answer near the top of the page, structured data, clear entity mentions, recency. If your site is one of three the model trusts on a topic, you appear in the citation strip and in the answer paragraph. If it isn't, you are invisible to that user.
The traffic is real and concentrated. Semrush's 17-month clickstream analysis found outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 206% year-on-year between January 2025 and January 2026, and the top 10 domains capture more than 30% of all referrals. The same winner-take-most dynamic plays out at the local level. Ask ChatGPT "best buyers agent in Brisbane" and you get a short list of three or four named firms with publisher and homepage links; every other firm in the city is invisible to that buyer. Closing that gap is what our SEO & AI Visibility service does, and the moves are the same ones walked through in How to Rank in ChatGPT Search and How to Do ChatGPT SEO. It sits next to Answer Engine Optimisation, the structural moves overlap, but a ChatGPT answer with sidebar citations is a different surface from a Google AI Overview.