OpenAI might be working on an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine that will be based on its ChatGPT. As per a post on a forum, the AI firm might have already created the domain and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates for the website, which are necessary to authenticate a website. If this is true, then OpenAI will directly position itself to compete with major players in the segment such as Google Search and Microsoft Bing as well as Perplexity AI, which also has its own AI search engine.

The information comes from a community post on Y Combinator’s Hacker News which claimed, “Search.chatgpt.com domain and SSL cert have been created.” The post was made by a netizen with the handle daolf, and the post had 127 upvotes at the time of writing. We took a look at the posting history of the user and did not find any leaks or rumours, although the tipster does share a significant amount of news articles on the forum. While this suggests that the information might be genuine, there is no way to know for sure.

However, some AI influencers have also begun posting about a ChatGPT-powered search engine on social media. Tipster @nonmayorpete posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) about the speculated search engine and even included the date May 9, suggesting that is the date when the domain will go live.

We tried to access search.chatgpt.com but the web page simply states “Not found”. Since it is a subdomain of chatgpt.com which is already taken by OpenAI, it is not possible to check the status of the subdomain.

An AI-powered search engine is not a new concept, however. Perplexity AI, which launched in 2022, is a popular example of a chatbot-controlled search engine. Users can search their queries and it scours through the internet to find relevant information in text form as well as shows websites that can offer additional information. Notably, Perplexity AI uses Microsoft Bing for its web indexing. If the rumours are true, OpenAI’s search engine product could function similarly.