How do you get the most out of ChatGPT search?

ChatGPT search has been live for a little over a week. Plus and Team subscribers have it now, Enterprise and Edu users get it in the coming weeks, and free users over the coming months. It turns ChatGPT into a tool that can look things up on the web while you chat and answer with links to its sources.

The feature is easy to use badly. Typed like a search engine, with three keywords, it gives you a bland paragraph. Used like a conversation with a research assistant, it can save real time. The difference comes down to three habits: ask a precise question, refine it with follow-ups, and read the sources.

Three ways to start a search

ChatGPT decides on its own when a question needs the web, for example when you ask about today's news or this week's weather. You can also take control:

• Click the web search icon in the message box before you send your question. This forces a search even when ChatGPT might have answered from memory.
• Type / and choose Search from the menu that pops up.
• Regenerate an answer with search. If ChatGPT answered from its training data and you want fresher information, you can regenerate that GPT-4o reply with search turned on.

Forcing a search matters for anything that changes: prices, opening hours, rules, schedules, product versions. A model's built-in knowledge stops at its training date; a search reads pages as they are today.

A worked research session

Say you run a small bakery and want to know whether to accept a new payment app. Here is how a session can go. The steps are what you type; the replies are summarized and illustrative.

First question, specific from the start:

Search the web: what fees does [payment app] charge small businesses in Canada for in-person card payments? Give the current rates, any monthly fee, and the date of the page you found them on.

Naming the country, the kind of business and the kind of payment cuts out pages that don't apply to you. Asking for the page date helps you spot stale information.

Follow-up, narrowing instead of starting over:

Now compare those fees with the two most common alternatives for a business taking about 400 card payments a month. Put it in a table.

ChatGPT keeps the context, so you don't repeat "small business in Canada." Each follow-up builds on the last search.

Follow-up, asking for the other side:

What complaints do small business owners raise about [payment app]? Look for reviews or forum discussions from this year, and tell me which sources you used.

Asking directly for criticism balances the marketing pages that often rank first.

Reading citations and the Sources panel

Answers that use search include inline citations, small links placed next to the statements they support. On the desktop website, you can hover over one to preview the source, and click to open it. At the end of the reply, a Sources button opens a side panel listing every page cited, plus other related links that weren't quoted.

Use the panel as a quick quality check before you trust the answer:

OpenAI says it worked with news publishers on how articles are chosen and summarized, and any website can choose to appear in results. That means coverage is broad, but it is still a selection made for you, so a quick look at who is being cited is worth the ten seconds it takes.

A note on privacy: to answer, ChatGPT may send your search queries, stripped of your identity, to outside search providers such as Bing, along with a general location based on your internet address. Leave names, account numbers and other personal details out of search questions.

When should you still use a regular search engine?

Use a regular search engine when you want to go somewhere rather than learn something. Finding a specific website, a login page, a store's contact page or a document you already know exists is faster with a list of links than with a written summary.

A search engine is also better when you need the full range of results. ChatGPT search picks a handful of pages and blends them into one answer; a results page lets you scan dozens, see what's missing, and judge for yourself. For research where completeness matters, such as checking every option in your area or seeing all coverage of a story, start with the list.

Keep in mind practical limits too. Searches in ChatGPT count against your plan's GPT-4o usage limit, so a long day of quick lookups can use it up. And for anything with legal, medical or financial consequences, go to the authoritative source directly, whatever tool pointed you there. If you set ChatGPT search as your Chrome default with OpenAI's extension, typing !g before a query in the address bar still sends that one search to Google.