This article was AI-generated as part of an experimental historical-content project. The date reflects the period being analyzed rather than the date the article was originally written.
In July, SearchGPT was a prototype with a waitlist. Today it is a button inside ChatGPT, an app many people already keep open all day. That move from a separate experiment to a feature of a familiar tool is the part of OpenAI’s announcement that matters most for reputation.
What launched
ChatGPT will now decide on its own when a question needs a web search, or users can trigger one manually. Answers include links to sources, and a Sources button opens a sidebar listing the references. OpenAI says the search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, drawing on third-party search providers and content supplied directly by partners. It lists a long set of publisher partners, including the Associated Press, Axel Springer, the Financial Times, Le Monde, News Corp and Reuters, and says any website or publisher can choose to appear.
Access starts today for Plus and Team subscribers and SearchGPT waitlist users. Enterprise and Edu customers get it in the next few weeks, and free users “over the coming months.” There is also a Chrome extension that lets users search ChatGPT directly from the browser’s address bar.
Three first screens on one day
Until recently, the first impression of a company formed almost entirely in one place: a page of Google results. This year added AI Overviews on top of those results. Now a third first screen is live, inside a chat window.
They do not behave the same way. A Google results page shows many sources side by side and lets the reader choose. An AI Overview compresses them into a paragraph with links. ChatGPT search does something different again. It answers in conversation, and OpenAI says it will “consider the full context of your chat” when users ask follow-up questions.
That last point is easy to overlook. A first impression in ChatGPT is not a single query. It is a short dialogue. Someone asks about a company, then asks about its CEO, then asks whether there were any controversies. Each answer is shaped by what came before. The impression forms over three or four turns, not one page.
Why the Sources sidebar matters
For communications teams, the most useful feature may be the least glamorous. The Sources sidebar shows, in a fairly direct way, which pages ChatGPT relied on for an answer. That is a window into what this system treats as evidence about you.
It is worth looking through that window now, while the audience is still mostly paying subscribers. Ask ChatGPT search the questions an investor, journalist or job candidate would ask about your company and your leadership. Ask the follow-ups too. Then check the sources. Are they current? Are they the pages you would want cited? Is an old controversy carrying more weight than its importance justifies?
None of this replaces watching Google. Google remains, by a wide margin, where most searches happen. But the Chrome extension is a small reminder that the browser default is now a contested space, in the same month the Justice Department asked a court to reconsider who gets to control it.
The practical shift
The old question was “what do people see when they search for us?” The new version has a few more words in it: what do people see, where, and after which follow-up? Reputation teams that answer only the first half will miss a growing share of the first impressions being formed about their companies.