ChatGPT's rebuilt search tool gives Reddit a year, others a month

OpenAI rebuilt the tool ChatGPT uses to search the web sometime between August 16 and August 20, 2026. The fan-out JSON call format is gone. In its place is a compact, pipe-delimited query language, and the search_queries metadata field that used to mirror the old fan-out has been removed from the payload entirely.

Search Engine Journal's Suganthan Mohanadasan ran the new format across eight questions and mapped what each line can say. Every search carries a call type, a query, and often two more fields: a number and a domain.

What the number does

The reporter reads the number as a freshness window in days, tracking how fast an answer type goes stale. He is explicit that this is his own inference: OpenAI has not published a spec for the field.

• A stock price check: 2 days

• Premier League results: 7 days

• Commercial brand comparisons, the SaaS pricing kind: 30 days

• Earnings guidance: 90 days

• A live chat software search naming Intercom, Gorgias, Zendesk, Ada, Tidio and Crisp, with its domain slot pointed at reddit.com: 365 days

Every brand-comparison line in his sample got 30 days. The Reddit-scoped line on the same topic got 365, 12 times longer.

What that means, and what it doesn't

If the reporter's reading holds, ChatGPT's tool treats Reddit threads about live chat software as content that stays useful for a year. It treats vendor pricing pages as needing a monthly check. That is a statement about how the tool searches. It does not describe what made it into the final answer. The article shows the query ChatGPT sent, not the response it produced, so whether that 365-day Reddit search actually returned a cited thread is not established here.

A gap in one captured run would not settle Reddit's standing either way. ChatGPT answers draw on training data as well as live retrieval, and a search tool that still reserves a wide, dedicated window for Reddit is itself evidence the site remains a source worth checking.

Also new: a domain field on every line

Targeting one website used to mean writing site:domain.com into the query text. The rebuilt format has a dedicated slot for it, sitting next to the query on every line the model writes.