SearchGPT no longer exists as a separate product. OpenAI announced it as a temporary prototype on July 25, 2024, then built its features into ChatGPT as ChatGPT search on October 31, 2024. Since February 5, 2025, ChatGPT search has been open to everyone in regions where ChatGPT is available, with no signup.
The SearchGPT timeline
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| July 25, 2024 | OpenAI announces SearchGPT, a temporary prototype of AI search features, for a small group of users and publishers, with a waitlist |
| October 31, 2024 | ChatGPT search launches for ChatGPT Plus and Team users and people on the SearchGPT waitlist |
| December 16, 2024 | ChatGPT search opens to all logged-in users |
| February 5, 2025 | ChatGPT search opens to everyone in regions where ChatGPT is available, no signup required |
Was SearchGPT discontinued?
It was absorbed, and OpenAI said that would happen from day one. The July 2024 announcement described a temporary prototype and said the company planned to integrate the best of its features into ChatGPT. TechCrunch's launch coverage reported the same plan.
The waitlist went the same way. People who had signed up for SearchGPT got ChatGPT search access at the October 31, 2024 launch. If a report, a tool, or an old article lists SearchGPT as an engine, read it as ChatGPT search.
What replaced it
ChatGPT search does the same job inside the main product: answers with links to web sources.
For site owners, the part that matters is the crawler. OpenAI's crawler documentation splits its bots by job:
| Crawler | What OpenAI uses it for |
|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Surfacing websites in ChatGPT's search features |
| GPTBot | Crawling content that may be used to train its models |
| ChatGPT-User | Fetching pages for a user's request; not used to decide what appears in search |
OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. Blocking GPTBot is a separate decision about training.
What this means for AEO work
Check robots.txt first. A rule written to block AI training can block OAI-SearchBot by accident, and that removes the site from ChatGPT search answers.
Then track ChatGPT on its own terms. ChatGPT and Perplexity share only about one in ten cited sources, so a page that wins citations in one engine tells you little about the other. ChatGPT citation share can also move fast: Reddit's share fell from roughly 3.83% to about 0.5% in about a week after an unannounced change.
The name is finished. The product it tested is ChatGPT search, and that is the thing to measure.