There are two different ways to search the public internet with ChatGPT—search and deep research. Below is an explanation of both, and when to use each.

ChatGPT search allows ChatGPT to pull in the latest information from the internet directly into your conversations. This means you can go beyond ChatGPT’s built-in training knowledge and get up-to-date answers on things like current events, market trends, competitor activity, or niche details not included in its training data.

Instead of toggling between multiple browser tabs and summarizing information yourself, search brings those updates directly into ChatGPT, streamlining your research and saving you time. It also makes it easy to combine fresh web data with the reasoning and summarization power of ChatGPT models.

Deep research in ChatGPT uses reasoning to quickly gather, summarize, and interpret extensive information from across the web, helping you answer complex questions more thoroughly than a standard web search.