Research with ChatGPT

ChatGPT can be a helpful research partner because it quickly brings together information from many sources, making it easier to explore ideas, spot patterns, and understand complex topics. By reasoning through context, citing sources, and producing clear, structured summaries, it helps turn open questions into well-defined insights.

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

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.

How to use search in a chat

1. Open a new chat in ChatGPT.

2. Ask a question that requires current or detailed information (e.g., “What are the top three AI trends in healthcare in 2025?”), or click Web Search from your tools menu.

3. Look for the small globe icon 🌐 next to the model’s response—this indicates that search was used.

4. Click the citation links in the response to review the original sources.

5. Follow-up with clarifying prompts, like “Summarize this in 3 bullet points for executives” or “Turn this into a customer-facing email draft.”

Additional considerations

Deep research

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.

How to use deep research in a chat

1.  Open ChatGPT and select deep research from your tools menu