OpenAI Rolling Out Chat History Search Feature on ChatGPT Web

OpenAI announced a new feature for its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT on Tuesday. The new capability will allow users to search through their chat history to quickly find relevant information from past conversations. This is a significant improvement from the current workaround which requires users to scroll through the entire history to find the desired conversation. Currently, the feature is only available on ChatGPT's web portal and is being rolled out to the paid subscribers of the platform.

ChatGPT Gets a Chat History Search Feature

In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official handle of OpenAI announced the new feature. The ability to search through past chats has been a highly requested feature by users, as currently, it gets increasingly time-consuming to find relevant information.

With the chat history search feature, users can now find a new magnifying glass icon on the side panel of ChatGPT web, which is placed on the left side of the window. Users can tap on this icon to open a text field where they can type keywords specific to find a past conversation. The text field also shows the recent chats to let users quickly pick one of them without needing to type anything.

The feature is currently being rolled out to ChatGPT Plus and Team users. OpenAI also highlighted that the Enterprise and Edu subscribers will get access to the chat history search feature within a week. However, those on the free tier of the platform will have to wait till the next month before they see this feature.

Notably, those using the Android and iOS apps of ChatGPT or are on the Windows or Mac desktop apps will not get this feature for the time being. OpenAI did not reveal if the feature will also be extended to these platforms in the near future.

OpenAI has been quietly adding new features to ChatGPT to keep it ahead of rivals. Another recent feature added to the web version of the platform is web search capability. This is different from the native capability of the GPT-4o model, which can scour the Internet.

With the search the web feature — available as a globe icon within the text field — the AI only uses websites to find the relevant information and displays it along with sources for each new piece of information. In functionality, this is somewhat similar to what Perplexity AI offers.