I’m surprised it took so long. After all, OpenAI’s ChatGPT powers Microsoft’s Bing search, so in some ways, the company has been in the search game from nearly the start.

What’s interesting is that OpenAI’s approach is less like Bing and Google’s AI Overviews and more like Perplexity AI—my favorite new search tool in years. This is a good thing, changing our relationship with search from a list of results that may hold the answer to our questions, to actual responses that you can drill into with additional questions.

For access you need to join a waitlist, and I’m on it, so I can’t kick the tires just yet. OpenAI expects to integrate search into ChatGPT in the long term rather than maintaining them as separate products.

This means the competition in search is heating up for Google—and so far, their attempts to add AI to search have been lacking.