The move, announced on Thursday, also places the AI giant in competition with its largest backer, Microsofts Bing search, and emerging services such as Perplexity - a search-focused AI chatbot firm backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and semiconductor giant Nvidia.
Shares of Googles parent company Alphabet ended 3% lower on Thursday after OpenAIs announcement.
OpenAI said it has opened sign-ups for the new tool, which is currently in the prototype stage and is being tested with a small group of users and publishers. The company plans to integrate the best features from the search tool into ChatGPT in the future.
AI-powered search tools from OpenAI and Perplexity reaffirm search as a content engagement model but pressure Google to be better at its own game, Canaccord Genuity analyst Kingsley Crane said.
Google dominates the search engine market with a 91.1% share as of June, according to web analytics firm Statcounter.
