Toolsmedium signal
ChatGPT search switched en masse to the site: operator
On August 20, Simon Willison relayed a measurement from Promptwatch showing that ChatGPT abruptly began narrowing its searches to preselected domains. The share of queries carrying the site: operator held between 0.3% and 0.5% for weeks, then jumped to 16% to 17% on August 8 — two days after OpenAI announced accuracy fixes in GPT-5.6. Willison concludes that the search tool internally has the shape search(query, recency, domains), which means the model picks domains before it even frames the question. If you care about visibility in that search, you are no longer competing only for a place in the result but for your domain to make the list the model assembles on its own.
Simon Willisonverified
