ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI assistant made by OpenAI that you type or talk to in everyday words to get answers, writing help and more. It can explain ideas, make images, help with work and code, and search the web. You can start free, on the web or in OpenAI's desktop and phone apps.
Source: OpenAI, ChatGPT overview, checked October 29, 2026
What ChatGPT means for your business
OpenAI's help center says ChatGPT may search the web on its own when a question would benefit from current information, and that answers from a web search may include citations you can click. It also says ChatGPT can use your rough location, based on your IP address, to find local results like restaurants. So a buyer who asks for a business nearby may get an answer built from pages on the web, with links back to them.
OpenAI's crawler page says sites that block OAI-SearchBot, the crawler for ChatGPT search, won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain navigation links. Blocking GPTBot, the crawler that collects pages for training, is a separate setting. We'd check your robots.txt file for both before anything else.
If you're deciding how much of your time ChatGPT deserves next to the other AI tools, our research on how people use AI tools compares how many people use each one and the clicks they send to websites.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, ChatGPT described itself as an AI assistant from OpenAI, cited no sources and didn't mention that it can search the web. Google's AI Overview called it a generative AI chatbot and cited IBM, Wikipedia, YouTube and OpenAI's overview page.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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