OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT with smarter history search and memory

OpenAI has rolled out an update to ChatGPT that makes it significantly easier for users to surface details from past conversations, sharpening the product’s positioning as a long-term digital assistant.

The update, which is being rolled out globally to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers, improves its history search and memory capabilities, allowing users to reference and retrieve information from earlier chats with far greater reliability. OpenAI said the system is now better at identifying relevant past conversations and attaching them as clickable sources, so users can jump directly to the original context.

In a release note, the company said the new experience allows people to recall anything from a recipe shared a year ago to a complex project plan discussed months earlier. “Any past chat used to answer your question now appears as a source so you can open and review the original context,” OpenAI said.

The move marks an important shift in how ChatGPT is positioned. Until now, the service has largely been used as a real-time assistant, good at answering questions in the moment, but less dependable when it came to acting as a persistent knowledge base. While OpenAI introduced a “Memory” feature last year to store user preferences and context, many heavy users complained that it struggled with scale, especially for those with long chat histories covering similar topics.

From chatbot to personal knowledge engine 

The latest update aims to close that gap by turning chat history into a searchable archive that behaves more like a personal database than a conversation log.

Instead of manually scrolling through months or years of conversations, users can now ask direct questions that reference past discussions and receive answers backed by links to the original chats.

That effectively turns ChatGPT into a permanent digital notebook for work, study and personal projects.  

Catching up with Google  

The upgrade also reflects OpenAI’s growing urgency to match Google’s rapid pace of innovation in AI-powered productivity tools. Google has been aggressively integrating Gemini across Search, Docs, Gmail and Workspace, positioning its AI as a persistent layer across a user’s digital life.

By making ChatGPT’s memory and history search more reliable, OpenAI is signalling that it wants the product to sit at the centre of users’ daily workflows.