OpenAI: “ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more. ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon. Search will be available at chatgpt.com⁠(opens in a new window), as well as on our desktop and mobile apps. All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, will have access today. Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the next few weeks. We’ll roll out to all Free users over the coming months…Chats now include links to sources, such as news articles and blog posts, giving you a way to learn more. Click the Sources button below the response to open a sidebar with the references…”

• See also MIT Technology Review: “At stake is the future of AI search—that is, chatbots that summarize information from across the web. If their growing popularity is any indication, these AI “answer engines” could replace traditional search engines as our default gateway to the internet. While ordinary AI chatbots can reproduce—often unreliably—information learned through training, AI search tools like Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s now-public SearchGPT aim to retrieve and repackage information from third-party websites. They return a short digest to users along with links to a handful of sources, ranging from research papers to Wikipedia articles and YouTube transcripts. The AI system does the reading and writing, but the information comes from outside….At its best, AI search can better infer a user’s intent, amplify quality content, and synthesize information from diverse sources. But if AI search becomes our primary portal to the web, it threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy. Today, the production of content online depends on a fragile set of incentives tied to virtual foot traffic: ads, subscriptions, donations, sales, or brand exposure. By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and “eyeballs” they need to survive. ..”
• See also ArsTechnica – Not just ChatGPT anymore: Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude get desktop apps