SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) – OpenAI on Monday said it is making ChatGPT-powered internet search available to all users, escalating its threat to Google’s dominance.

The San Francisco-based tech firm had beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying subscribers.

The newly public feature enables users to receive “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant web sources –- information that previously required using a traditional search engine, the company said.

The upgrade to ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the web.

“We’re bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said in a video posted at YouTube.

“That means it’ll be available globally on every platform where you use ChatGPT.”

Examples of the new interface demonstrated by OpenAI resembled search results provided by Google and Google Maps, though without the clutter of advertising.

They also appeared similarly to the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by featuring the sources it referenced in the answer.

“We’re really just making the ChatGPT experience that you know better with up-to-date information from the web,” ChatGPT Search product lead Adam Fry said in the video.

“We’re rolling this out to hundreds of millions of users, starting today.”

Rather than launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT.

Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually via a web search icon.

Since their launch, data on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude have been limited by time cutoffs, so the answers they provided were not up-to-date.

In contrast, Google and Microsoft both combine AI-generated answers with web results.

The addition of online search to ChatGPT will raise more questions about the startup’s link to Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has set his company on a path to become an internet powerhouse.

He successfully catapulted the company to a staggering $157 billion valuation in a recent round of fundraising that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank and AI chipmaker Nvidia as investors.

Enticing new users with search engine capabilities will increase the company’s computing needs and costs, which are enormous.