San Francisco, California - OpenAI on Monday made its ChatGPT-powered internet search engine available to all users, escalating its threat to Google's market dominance.

The San Francisco-based tech firm had beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but at the time only made the feature available to paid subscribers.

Enabling "fast, timely answers" with links to sources, the new search engine takes the fight to Google as it allows users to quickly find and source information.

"We're bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT," OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said in a video posted on YouTube.

"So that means it'll be available globally on every platform where you use ChatGPT," Weil said in the video, which dropped on Monday.

During the 13-minute demo shown off in the video, viewers are given a glimpse into how the system works, looking eerily similar to Google and other similar search engines.

Having searched for notable events happening in San Francisco, a list of results appears, providing not only preliminary information about each event but also links to the websites and sources if you want more information.

After establishing a few potential events, ChatGPT Search's product lead, Adam Fry, points out that it had been raining in San Francisco and further curates his search request to take that into account.

Interestingly, when looking up a movie trailer, Fry reveals that YouTube videos now appear embedded in the ChatGPT results, available to watch from within the program's user interface.

"We're really just making the ChatGPT experience that you know better with up-to-date information from the web," Adam Fry said in the video.

"To recap, we're rolling this out to hundreds of millions of users, starting today, all logged-in free users globally who have ChatGPT."