SearchGPT
Also called: OpenAI SearchGPT, SearchGPT prototype
SearchGPT was OpenAI's 2024 prototype AI search engine that answered questions from live web results with inline citations and links to sources. OpenAI folded it into ChatGPT, launching ChatGPT search in October 2024, so today the name effectively refers to ChatGPT's built-in web search.
From prototype to ChatGPT search
OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT in July 2024 as a “temporary prototype,” open to a small group of roughly 10,000 users and publishers. It paired OpenAI’s models with live web results, answering a query directly and citing named sources inline instead of returning ten blue links. OpenAI always framed it as a testbed and said it planned to bring the best features into ChatGPT.
That happened on October 31, 2024, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT search. Over the following months access widened from Plus and Team subscribers to all logged-in users, then to free accounts. So in 2026, “SearchGPT” is not a separate app you visit. The name is shorthand for the web-search capability built into ChatGPT.
What matters for site owners is how pages get pulled in. ChatGPT search is fed by a dedicated crawler, OAI-SearchBot, which is separate from GPTBot (model training). Per OpenAI’s docs, OAI-SearchBot is “used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features,” and you control it in robots.txt independently of training. You can allow AI search inclusion while blocking training, for example:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /Getting cited also depends on clear, extractable answers and topical authority, the same signals that win AI Overviews and Perplexity citations.
How it affects your traffic
ChatGPT's web search sends real referral clicks, but only to pages it can crawl and trust enough to cite. If OAI-SearchBot is blocked, or your answers are buried in fluff, you are invisible in that surface no matter how you rank on Google. Our AI SEO service makes pages crawlable by OAI-SearchBot, structures answers so they are easy to quote, and tracks whether ChatGPT actually names you.
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