Hello Google, ChatGPT Just Became a Travel Search Engine

ChatGPT just became a browser-based search engine with real-time links, maps, weather, sports, stocks and news.

Real-time search is an important next step for ChatGPT, which had been training on data from a more restricted time period. There is a Chrome extension to make ChatGPT your default search engine.

There are plenty of implications for travel. I asked ChatGPT.com, “Can you plan a trip for me along California’s Pacific Coast Highway?”

It answered with a 5-day itinerary from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, pulling information and links from sources such as Californiacrossings.com, National Geographic, California.com, Travel + Leisure, and many others.

“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,” OpenAI’s announcement stated.

“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.”

The new tool is available Thursday on ChatGPT.com, desktop and mobile apps for ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users. Enterprise and Edu users are slated to get the feature in the next few weeks, while free users will need to wait a few months, OpenAI said in an announcement Thursday.

The introduction of search engine functionality comes as a major challenge to Google — in the long term — although Google is developing its own product in Gemini. Google has introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of its traditional results page. There’s no advertising yet on ChatGPT.com.

Travel will be a focus of OpenAI’s search engine development. The company stated: “We plan to keep improving search, particularly in areas like shopping and travel, and leverage the reasoning capabilities of the OpenAI o1 series to do deeper research.”