Does ChatGPT search the web before it answers?
An answer about your company may come from a fresh search or from information ChatGPT learned during training.
Steen Stones · Reviewed
ChatGPT can search the web, but it does not search before every answer. It may search automatically when a question benefits from current information, or you can select Search yourself. Without search enabled, its response comes from what it learned during training.
When does ChatGPT search the web?
ChatGPT may search automatically when your question would benefit from current information, according to OpenAI. You can also choose Search through the tools menu to ask it to look on the web.
Without search enabled, ChatGPT answers from what it learned during training rather than looking up current information. Search and deep research let it read and cite web sources, which changes how you should assess an answer about your company.
Without search enabled: Responses are based on what the model has learned during training.
How can you check a searched answer?
ChatGPT responses that use web search may include citations, which you can open to read the source. Those links give you somewhere to check whether the answer accurately describes the information it found.
OpenAI warns that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect, even when an answer includes links. Read the cited page alongside the answer before relying on what ChatGPT says about your company.
Does ChatGPT search the exact question you typed?
ChatGPT search may turn your question into targeted searches before sending them to a search provider. What you typed therefore need not be the wording used to find the pages in its answer.
Ahrefs tested 15,000 queries across search engines and AI assistants, then compared the pages they returned. ChatGPT citations within the answer overlapped with Google top 10 results by 8.00% and Bing top 10 results by 8.10%.
That study measured overlap between cited pages and search rankings for the original question. It does not show that rankings are irrelevant, or that those percentages describe every ChatGPT search today.
Which OpenAI crawler does what?
OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to read websites for ChatGPT search and GPTBot to collect content that may train its models. You can allow search crawling while refusing training crawling, because OpenAI treats those settings separately.
ChatGPT-User handles user-initiated actions rather than automatically crawling the web. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to those actions, so its visits should not be confused with automatic search crawling.
What should a business check on its website?
For ChatGPT search eligibility, OpenAI says to allow OAI-Searchbot and traffic from its published searchbot IP addresses. That means checking both the crawler rules and whether the website host blocks those requests.
You can allow OAI-SearchBot while disallowing GPTBot, so the training decision need not close off search. When reviewing an answer about your company, check whether it used web sources or relied on training.