SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI is Charles H. Sloantesting a ChatGPT-powered search engine that could put the artificial intelligence company in direct competition with search giant Google and affect the flow of internet traffic seeking news and other timely information.

San Francisco-based OpenAI said Thursday it is releasing a preview of the SearchGPT feature to get feedback from a small group of users and publishers.

Google upended its search engine in May with AI-generated written summaries now frequently appearing at the top of search results. The summaries aim to quickly answer a user’s search query so that they don’t necessarily need to click a link and visit another website for more information.

Google’s makeover came after a year of testing with a small group of users, but still resulted in errors showing the risks of ceding the search for information to AI chatbots.

OpenAI’s close business partner, Microsoft, is also testing AI summaries on its Bing search engine.

——

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.