OpenAI acquires notable 'chat.com' domain to offer ChatGPT services

OpenAI has announced its ChatGPT has a second destination. The artificial intelligence chatbot is now available via 'chat.com' -- an iconic domain that several companies and individuals have outbid each other to grab to bolster their online presence with the utmost convenience for internet users. In other words, visiting 'chat.com' now opens ChatGPT, in addition to the original 'chatgpt.com' domain.

First registered in 1996, 'chat.com' has previously been owned by companies that wanted to strengthen their position on the web. CEO Sam Altman announced one of the significant developments for the Microsoft-backed AI company via a post on X. "chat.com," he wrote, without mentioning anything.

While OpenAI has not revealed the price it had to shell out to acquire the domain, 'chat.com' was most recently bought by HubSpot's co-founder Dharmesh Shah for $15.5 million in 2023. It is also one of the most expensive domains available on the internet. OpenAI's acquisition may have paid more than that, but the company is not retiring the original domain. Nor is it planning to rebrand its AI bot, which has become a verb for looking up anything using artificial intelligence -- similar to how Google is used for searching anything on the internet.

'Chat.com' is also a more memorable domain, helping OpenAI target more customers more effectively, especially with the onslaught of rivals like Google's Gemini, Bing Chat, and Perplexity AI.

The development comes days after OpenAI announced that ChatGPT can now work as a search engine, allowing users to find out more relevant and recent information from the internet on top of what the bot can fetch from its database. "ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before so you get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources," said the company. The addition of the search engine functionality to ChatGPT puts it in a more competitive position against Google, which owns the world's most popular search engine and is using the capabilities to power its Gemini AI service.