Dated changes to ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, each linked to the operator's own announcement or documentation.
Launches, country and language expansions, new features, model updates, policy and crawler changes, and reporting tools for four AI search products, from their first public versions to today. A change to both Google products is listed once, under the one its source names first. Minor interface changes are left out.
Each event links to the operator's own post, help page or documentation, and its date is taken from that page. When a source confirms only the month, only the month is shown. Press reports are cited only where no official post exists, and the event says so. Last verified 23 September 2026.
Every event has a permanent anchor shown next to its verification date. Link to it directly, for example recoproof.com/ai-search-timeline#perplexity-ask-launch, and cite the operator's source with it. Anchors do not change when events are added.
RecoProof measures AI answers through provider APIs with web search, not through these consumer products; Google AI Overviews and AI Mode have no official API. The changes listed here can still move which brands and sources an answer names, and model or search updates can change API results as well. Before reading a difference between two measurement dates as a trend, check whether a change on this timeline falls between them. See the methodology for how collection conditions are recorded.
Google updated its announcements and help pages to say that, as of 31 August 2026, the generative AI performance reports and the generative AI opt-out control in Search Console had rolled out to all websites worldwide.
Google made AI Overviews and AI Mode available in Google Search in France, with questions accepted by text, voice or image. Google's French announcement says AI Mode there uses Gemini 3.5.
Google launched Search Console reports that show how often a site's pages appear in generative AI features on Search, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, and in Discover. They count impressions by page, country, device and date, and rolled out first to a subset of sites in the UK.
Google began testing a Search Console control that lets site owners keep their pages out of generative AI features in Search, such as AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover, including their use to ground answers. Sites that opt out get no traffic from those features. The test started with a subset of UK site owners.
At Google I/O 2026, Google made Gemini 3.5 Flash the default model in AI Mode for everyone globally and announced a redesigned Search box.
Google rolled out link changes in AI Mode and AI Overviews: suggested articles, more links placed directly within responses, labels on links from a user's news subscriptions, and previews of perspectives from forums and social media with the creator's name or community.
GPT-5.5 Instant replaced GPT-5.3 Instant as the default model for all ChatGPT users. OpenAI's release notes list better decisions about when ChatGPT searches the web among the changes, alongside accuracy and conciseness.
Product results in ChatGPT became more visual and easier to compare, rolling out to Free, Go, Plus and Pro users that week. Retailers including Target, Best Buy and Wayfair joined the Agentic Commerce Protocol for product discovery, and OpenAI said merchants could use their own checkout instead of Instant Checkout.
OpenAI started a test of ads for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go plans in the US. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education plans do not show ads, and OpenAI says ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives.
Google made Gemini 3 the default model for AI Overviews globally. On mobile, users worldwide could also continue from an AI Overview straight into an AI Mode conversation.
Google began rolling out Gemini 3 Flash as the default model for AI Mode globally. Google also said Gemini 3 Pro was available in AI Mode in the US.
OpenAI started rolling out shopping research on web and mobile for logged-in Free, Go, Plus and Pro users. It draws on a user's past conversations and ChatGPT memory to produce a buyer's guide for a purchase decision.
Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US could use Gemini 3 Pro in AI Mode by choosing the Thinking option. Google said it was the first time it had brought a Gemini model to Search on the day the model was released.
AI Mode launched in more than 35 new languages and over 40 new countries and territories, including many in Europe, making it available in over 200 countries and territories in total.
Perplexity released Comet to everyone for free. Since its July launch the browser had been limited to Max subscribers and invited users from the waitlist.
US ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Free users could buy single items from US Etsy sellers without leaving the chat, with Shopify merchants announced as coming next. OpenAI also published the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard developed with Stripe for purchases made through AI agents.
Perplexity announced Comet Plus, a 5 dollar subscription that allocates revenue to publishing partners based on human visits, search citations and agent actions. Pro and Max subscribers get it included.
Google extended AI Mode in English to more than 180 new countries and territories beyond the US, India and the UK. The same update added agentic restaurant reservations for US Google AI Ultra subscribers through a Labs experiment.
Cloudflare said Perplexity used undeclared crawlers to get around robots.txt blocks, removed it from its verified bot list and added blocking rules. Perplexity replied the same day that pages fetched to answer a user's question are not crawling and that the content is not stored for training.
Cloudflare's post is its own account of the dispute; Perplexity's reply is listed first.
AI Mode started rolling out in the UK as a tab on the Search results page and in the Google app for Android and iOS.
Perplexity released Comet, a web browser with its AI assistant built in, to Perplexity Max subscribers. Invite-only access for people on the waitlist was to follow over the summer.
AI Mode came to India as a Search Labs experiment in English, its first market outside the US.
Google's Search Central changelog records that data from AI Mode now counts toward the totals in the Search Console Performance report, and Google updated its AI features documentation to explain how AI Mode traffic is counted.
At Google I/O, Google said AI Overviews were available in more than 200 countries and territories and more than 40 languages, adding Arabic, Chinese, Malay and Urdu among others. Google also began bringing a custom version of Gemini 2.5 to AI Overviews in the US that week.
At Google I/O, Google began rolling out AI Mode in the US as a tab in Search and in the Google app, with no Labs sign-up needed. Google described its query fan-out technique, which splits a question into subtopics and runs many searches at once.
For questions with shopping intent, ChatGPT search began showing product recommendations with images, reviews and direct links to buy. The rollout covered Pro, Plus, Free and logged-out users. OpenAI's help article says product results are selected by ChatGPT and are not ads.
OpenAI's help article on shopping results is undated. The rollout date and plans come from TechCrunch's same-day report of OpenAI's announcement.
Signed-in users aged 18 and over in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland started to see AI Overviews, in English and, in most of these countries, the local languages.
Google said it had launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the US, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal questions, and that AI Overviews would appear more often for those queries. Teens gained access and users no longer needed to sign in.
Google introduced AI Mode, an early Search Labs experiment that answers complex questions with a custom version of Gemini 2.0, supports follow-up questions and links to web pages. Google One AI Premium subscribers were invited to try it first.
Perplexity launched Deep Research on the web, a mode that runs many searches and writes a report in two to four minutes. Pro subscribers get a high volume of queries and non-subscribers a limited number per day.
Perplexity made a new version of Sonar, its in-house model, available to all Pro users. Sonar is built on Llama 3.3 70B and further trained for answer factuality and readability in Perplexity's default search mode.
OpenAI updated its launch post to say search was open to everyone in the regions where ChatGPT is available, with no sign-up required, so people using ChatGPT while logged out also get answers with web sources.
OpenAI added a note to its launch post saying search was now available to every logged-in ChatGPT user in the regions where ChatGPT is offered, which extended it from paid plans to free accounts.
Perplexity added a shopping experience for researching and buying products. Its Buy with Pro option lets Pro subscribers in the US check out inside Perplexity for selected products from selected merchants.
Search became part of ChatGPT on the web and in the desktop and mobile apps, first for Plus and Team subscribers and SearchGPT waitlist users. ChatGPT decides when to search, or the user can choose search manually, and answers link to their sources. OpenAI said Enterprise, Edu and Free users would follow.
Google began rolling out AI Overviews in more than 100 countries and territories and made them available in more languages. Google said the expansion would bring AI Overviews to more than 1 billion users a month.
After several months of testing, Google announced that ads were now available within AI Overviews for mobile users in the US.
Google began bringing AI Overviews to six more countries, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil, with support for the local language in each.
Perplexity named TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress.com as the first partners in its Publishers' Program. It said partners would receive a share of revenue when Perplexity earns money from an interaction that references their content, starting with planned ads in related questions.
OpenAI opened a waitlist test of SearchGPT, a prototype that answered questions with current web information and linked sources. It started with a small group of users and publishers, and OpenAI said it planned to bring the features into ChatGPT later.
With the SearchGPT prototype, OpenAI said sites could appear in its search results even if they opt out of generative AI training, and pointed publishers to its crawler documentation. That documentation lists OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for surfacing sites in search, separate from GPTBot, which collects training data.
OpenAI's crawler page is undated. Search Engine Land's report from the day of the SearchGPT announcement quotes it naming OAI-SearchBot.
Perplexity began rolling out Pages, which turns a research topic into an article-style page that users can adjust for an audience and publish, starting from the library tab.
At Google I/O, Google moved AI Overviews out of the Search Labs experiment and began rolling them out to all users in the US, with more countries to follow. Google said it expected AI Overviews to reach over a billion people by the end of 2024.
Google announced Google-Extended, a robots.txt token that lets sites decide whether their content helps improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs. Google's documentation states that the token does not affect inclusion in Google Search; limiting what AI Overviews show relies on Search controls such as nosnippet.
Google introduced SGE, an experiment that added AI-generated responses with links to supporting pages at the top of search results. It was offered through the new Search Labs program on Chrome desktop and the Google app, in the US and in English only at launch.
Perplexity, founded in August 2022, released its answer engine, then called Ask, in December 2022. The company later reported reaching 2 million monthly active users within four months.
Missing an event or found a wrong date? Tell us with the official source. Related: the AI crawler checker for the crawlers named here, and RecoProof research on how AI answers cite B2B software.
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