Does ChatGPT’s Recent Change Spell the End for Google?

OpenAI continues to add new features to ChatGPT, with the arrival of ChatGPT 4.5 one of the biggest recent updates. However, a small recent change has the potential to have a significant impact.

ChatGPT Now Lets You Search Without Sign In

On February 5, 2025, OpenAI made a small but potentially significant change to ChatGPT. Up until that date, if you wanted to use ChatGPT to search the web, you needed to be logged into an account. You didn’t need a paid account, but you need to have an account set up and be signed in to your account to use ChatGPT search.

Now anyone can use ChatGPT without an account. There’s no need to sign in; you can simply open the ChatGPT website and search.

Why is this such a big deal? Well, it means that you can now use ChatGPT as a search engine without any hindrance. Just open the web page and search, just like you do with Google. Anyone can use it, anywhere, at any time.

How ChatGPT Search Compares to Google

Search using ChatGPT is a very different experience from using Google, or other traditional search engines. When you search with Google, you get a list of links to websites that match the criteria of your search. Search for “eggs” for example, and you get a list of links to web pages relating to eggs.

When you use ChatGPT search, you don’t get a list of links to websites. Instead, you get a written response in natural language. You can ask for a list of links if you want, but that’s not the default way that ChatGPT will respond.

ChatGPT Search Compares Favorably With Google in Many Ways

The way that ChatGPT responds is beneficial in many instances. If you’re seeking information, for example, the list of links returned by Google means you need to open a link and find the information you need somewhere on that web page. If you ask ChatGPT to search for information, it will not only find appropriate websites, but it will also extract the relevant information for you and return it in an easily digestible format.

ChatGPT search can also answer queries that Google just isn’t able to handle. For instance, a query such as “who is that character in the James Bond films who appears in lots of them and dies in one of them” will bring up a whole list of useless results in Google. Ask the same of ChatGPT, however, and it will correctly tell you that you’re probably thinking of Felix Leiter.

Another major benefit of ChatGPT search is that it can pull information from multiple sources. With Google, the information you want may be spread across multiple web pages, meaning you need to visit each one to extract the full information. ChatGPT search can do it for you, finding relevant information on multiple sites and combining it into a single answer.

Google has introduced a feature called AI Overviews that can answer questions in a similar way to ChatGPT, but currently you’re still left with a list of search results after the initial AI overview. You can’t interact with the AI overview to ask follow-up questions like you can when using ChatGPT search, especially notable given that the overview can sometimes be hilariously wrong.

One of the best things about using ChatGPT search compared to Google is the lack of ads. Google results will often include multiple sponsored links or sponsored products, which is part of how Google makes its money. ChatGPT (so far, at least) doesn’t include any advertising in its responses; it simply gives you the information you need.

Google Still Has the Upper Hand in Some Areas

That’s not to say that ChatGPT search is superior in every way to Google. There are plenty of things that Google can do that ChatGPT still can’t.

For example, searching for videos or images on Google is as simple as clicking the appropriate tab above the search results. ChatGPT will predominantly provide text-based responses. Google can also offer useful shopping links if you’re looking for a specific product, which ChatGPT can’t do.

Perhaps the biggest issue with ChatGPT search is that generative AI chatbots don’t always get things right. They can hallucinate, and you may find that your responses contain information that is incorrect or even made up. Using ChatGPT search, you will usually get a list of sources which provides links to the websites where information has been taken from, but this is no guarantee that the information that ChatGPT is presenting is an accurate representation of those websites.

Can ChatGPT Really Replace Google?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes, but only sometimes. For general search queries, ChatGPT can be equally to Google, if not better. For complex queries, ChatGPT is far superior. As mentioned above, however, there are still some things that ChatGPT can’t do.

I use ChatGPT for searching the vast majority of the time, but I still have to return to Google or other similar search engines if I’m searching for videos or images or products. In its current incarnation, ChatGPT can replace Google for many searches, but not for everything.

I look forward to the day when there is a superior option that can fully replace Google, because I find it incredibly frustrating how much worse the search engine has become over time.

Why Google Is Safe (for Now)

We’re not anywhere near the point where Google needs to start worrying. ChatGPT making search possible without signing in, means that more people are likely to start using it, but it’s a stretch to imagine that enough people will switch to ChatGPT to truly harm Google’s market share. Even your most tech-illiterate family members know how to use Google, and many people are happy to stick with what they know.

Google is also mitigating some of the reasons that people might move away by implementing features like AI Overview. As bad as it can be, it means that Google can answer questions without people needing to find the information themselves by wading through the various search results.

However, in the long term, Google is going to need to change how it works, and it seems that change is already on the way. On March 5, Google announced that it is launching an experimental feature called AI Mode. This essentially replaces the list of blue links that have been part of Google search from the outset in favor of just AI Overviews, with links to relevant information included in the text of the AI-generated responses.

There’s a Potential Crisis Brewing

Unfortunately, the way that ChatGPT and Google are moving away from providing lists of websites in search results could lead to a serious problem. Much of the content on the internet is produced by websites that make their money from advertising. However, they only receive that ad revenue if people visit their websites.

Searching using ChatGPT or using features such as AI Overview means that you don’t need to visit websites to access the information that they hold. Fewer clicks for publishers means less ad revenue, and for many publishers this is unlikely to be sustainable.

Even if Google somehow survives a system that seems to be eating into its own ad revenues, too, at some point it seems highly likely that things are going to collapse. For ChatGPT or Google to provide AI responses to queries, they need to get the information from somewhere. Once publishers have been driven out of business, however, AI will have nowhere to get the information from.

These new search methods seem to be harming the very sources of information that they rely on, and once those sources are gone, AI won’t be able to answer questions on new topics, as it will have nowhere to find the answers. It’s everyone’s best interests for AI companies and publishers to find a way for the publishers to get fair compensation for AI taking information from its pages. Content licensing is one option that has the potential to solve the problem.

ChatGPT no longer requiring an account to use web search seems like a small change, but it has potentially significant consequences. In many circumstances, AI search can provide a more helpful result than traditional search engines.

However, if all search goes the same way, and a fair solution isn’t found, it could see the end of much of the high-quality content that’s currently being produced online. At which point, everybody loses.