OpenAI Developing Web Crawler and Index

This shifts the real contest from having the best chat UI to owning the pipes underneath web answers. Once OpenAI builds its own crawler and index, it can stop depending as heavily on outside search infrastructure, control freshness and ranking directly, and fold search tighter into ChatGPT. That weakens one of Perplexity’s earliest advantages, because cited AI search becomes easier for a giant model lab with massive consumer traffic to copy and bundle.1 2 3 4

• OpenAI signaled this move as early as July 25, 2024 with SearchGPT, a prototype built to answer with live web information and clear sources, with plans to bring those features into ChatGPT. The strategic direction was search as a native product, not just a model add on.1
• Perplexity responded by building its own search stack too. Its engineering team says its infrastructure tracks over 200 billion unique URLs, using a hybrid of keyword and semantic retrieval, because older search APIs were too stale, incomplete, or slow for AI answers.2 4
• Perplexity also reduced dependence on any single model vendor. Its Sonar line is based on Meta’s Llama and fine tuned in house, while Pro Search routes across models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity itself. That makes the company more of a search and orchestration layer than a pure model wrapper.3 5 6

The next phase is vertical integration on both sides. OpenAI is moving downward into crawling and indexing, while Perplexity is moving upward into browsers, agents, and proprietary retrieval. The winner is likely to be the company that turns search from a one off answer into a daily habit, then into a place where users also complete the task that follows the answer.2 4 6