ChatGPT can now more reliably find information from your previous conversations. If you’re a Plus or Pro subscriber, you can now search your entire chat history, all the way back to when you first created your account, and ask questions related to anything you’ve previously talked about.
While ChatGPT saves your chat history and lets you search it manually, the feature was unreliable. It’s often difficult to find the right conversation, especially if you have several similar threads.
This update, called PersonalContextAgentTool in the system, helps ChatGPT retrieve details from past conversations. This means you no longer have to manually search through older chats when you need help with a recipe you asked about weeks ago or a workout plan you created months ago.
The new history reference works a bit like click-through sources. If ChatGPT uses something from an old chat to answer your question, that previous chat will appear as a clickable source that you can open and review. This gives you certainty about where a detail came from and allows you to return to the original context if necessary.
ChatGPT follows Gemini’s example in terms of the chat history feature
While this is a welcome upgrade for ChatGPT users, it comes relatively late. Google’s Gemini introduced the ability to reference past conversations back in February 2025, meaning Gemini users have been enjoying more context-aware, continuous chats for some time now.
Still, OpenAI has worked to evolve ChatGPT with important model updates, including the introduction of GPT-5 and a follow-up to ChatGPT-5.1 that adds new personalities, a warmer tone, and faster responses.
For ChatGPT Plus and Pro users, this history search feature represents a step forward in making the experience personal and contextual. Instead of treating each chat in isolation, the system now stitches together threads of your past conversations, making it feel more like talking to a human who remembers what you’ve said before.
