Perplexity Did Not Buy SearchGPT — Here’s What Actually Happened

A story is circulating that Perplexity acquired SearchGPT — OpenAI’s search experiment — for $180 million, picking up its indexing infrastructure and user base in the process. It’s a clean narrative: the scrappy AI search startup mops up after the big dog walks away, consolidates its position, and rides off into the sunset as the undisputed alternative to Google. There’s just one problem — there is no credible evidence this deal happened.

Promptyze could not verify the core claims of this story through any reliable source. No announcement from Perplexity’s newsroom. No SEC filing. No coverage from The Verge, Reuters, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, or any outlet that routinely covers major AI acquisitions. A $180 million technology acquisition between two of the most-watched AI companies in the world would generate significant press. It generated none.

What We Know About SearchGPT

OpenAI launched SearchGPT as a prototype in July 2024 and later integrated web search capabilities directly into ChatGPT. As of early 2026, ChatGPT’s search feature is live and actively developed — not frozen, not sold off. OpenAI has been expanding its search integrations, including partnerships with news publishers and real-time data providers. The idea that OpenAI quietly offloaded this infrastructure to a competitor without a single credible report surfacing is not plausible.

Perplexity, for its part, has been building its own crawling and indexing infrastructure independently. The company raised $500 million at a $9 billion valuation in January 2025 and has been on an aggressive product expansion. There is no public record of a deal with OpenAI being part of that trajectory.

Why This Matters

Fabricated or unverified acquisition stories do real damage — to companies, to readers, and to the credibility of AI coverage as a whole. The AI space moves fast enough that plausible-sounding rumors can spread before anyone checks the receipts. This one had all the hallmarks of a story people want to be true: a clean competitive narrative, a specific dollar figure, a tidy strategic rationale. That’s exactly when skepticism earns its keep.

Promptyze’s policy is straightforward — if a fact cannot be confirmed through verifiable sources, it does not appear in the article. That applies here in full. The working brief cited “Perplexity Newsroom” as a source, but no such announcement exists on Perplexity’s official channels as of March 4, 2026.

What’s Actually Happening in AI Search

The real story in AI search is genuinely interesting, even without a fictional acquisition. Perplexity is the most credible challenger to Google’s search dominance right now, growing its query volume and experimenting with a publisher revenue-sharing model. OpenAI’s ChatGPT search is maturing and now handles a significant slice of informational queries that used to go straight to Google. Google itself is pushing AI Overviews hard across Search, with Gemini 2.5 Pro powering more of its responses. The competition is real, the stakes are high, and nobody needs to make anything up.

If Perplexity and OpenAI ever do close a deal of this scale, it will be loud news — with press releases, regulatory filings, and approximately forty takes from every tech outlet simultaneously. Until then, this one stays in the unverified pile where it belongs.