ChatGPTGeminiClaudeGrok
ChatGPT's sidebar search matches conversation titles. AI Toolbox (formerly ChatGPT Toolbox), a Chromium extension by Infi Developments, indexes every message of every conversation in your browser and searches the text itself: press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F, type a phrase, and each result shows the sentence that matched, highlighted, with a link into the chat and a bulk bar to act on what you found.
Free with 5 results per query and tag, archive or delete on results. Premium adds Exact Match, role and date filters, include and exclude chips, unlimited results, folder filing and export.
Free plan, 5 results per query | Premium $9.99/mo | Lifetime $99 | All Access $199 once for all four modules
Search History on chatgpt.com
The gap
ChatGPT has a search box in its sidebar. It lists conversations whose title matches. It does not look inside messages, show the matching passage, or offer a single filter, and the sidebar itself only loads a slice of a long history.
That works for a chat you named well. It fails for the way most people use ChatGPT: a regex it wrote in March, a figure from a long analysis, a phrasing you liked in a draft. Those live inside replies, and the only native way to find them is to open chats one by one and use the browser's Ctrl+F.
AI Toolbox adds a Search History panel to chatgpt.com. The index is built in your browser from your own history, so nothing is uploaded and results come back in a fraction of a second, even across a thousand conversations.
Why it matters
Here is what you cannot do with ChatGPT alone:
The more you use ChatGPT, the more of your work sits in old replies. Search is what turns that history from a scrollable list into something you can query.
Step by step
Six steps from install to a filtered result. The first five are on the free plan; the sixth is where Premium starts.
About a minute, including the first index
Exact Match on a real history: 1,269 messages in 501 conversations
Exact Match on for json returns 1,269 messages in 501 conversations in 0.19 seconds, each labelled Q or A with the term highlighted in titles and snippets. Exact Match, the role pills and the date pills are Premium; a plain query on the free plan searches everything with no filter applied.
What search can do
Every item below is in the shipping ChatGPT module. Free covers the search itself; Premium covers filtering and acting on results.
Every message in every conversation is indexed locally, so a query matches the body of a reply, not only the chat title.
Plan: Free, 5 results per query
Each result shows the matching sentence with the term highlighted, a Q or A label, the date and how many messages in that chat matched.
Plan: Free
One chord opens Search History from anywhere on chatgpt.com. The last five queries are saved locally and shown as pills.
Plan: Free
Tick the conversations a search found and tag, archive or delete them together from the bulk bar.
Plan: Free, 5 per batch; Premium unlimited
Match the exact phrase, keep only your questions or only ChatGPT's answers, and limit to the past week, month, year or a custom from-to range.
Plan: Premium and Lifetime
Guided chips instead of query syntax: require every term or any of them, exclude words, or restrict matching to conversation titles.
Plan: Premium and Lifetime
File every match into a folder in one pass, or export the selection as TXT, Markdown, JSON or PDF.
Plan: Premium and Lifetime
Export only the passages that matched, as Markdown or TXT, so a research question becomes a clean set of quotes with links back to each chat.
Plan: Premium and Lifetime
One query across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, results grouped by platform, opened with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+. from any tab. Opt-in, on-device index.
Plan: Premium and Lifetime
Search ships free on every module. Compare ChatGPT plans.
In detail
Advanced search
Type launch and budget under Must include and transaction under Exclude, switch Exact Match on, and the 1,700 messages that mention a launch become the 28 that are about this one. Chips are plain words or phrases; there is nothing to quote or escape.
Role and date
Pick Answers and Past month and a vague query like Q3 marketing budget returns the one reply that holds the allocation table. Questions does the reverse when you want to rebuild a prompt you wrote.
Search all platforms
With All Access, Search all platforms runs the same query over every AI you use, groups the matches by platform, and exports the selection as one ZIP with a folder per platform. The unified index is built on your device and is off until you switch it on.
Methods compared
Verified against the shipping extension and ChatGPT's sidebar search, August 2026.
| Method | Scope | Filters | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT sidebar search | Conversation titles | None | A list of titles | Free |
| Browser Ctrl+F | The one chat that is open | None | Highlights on the page | Free |
| ChatGPT data export | Whole account, after the archive email arrives | None | A conversations.json to grep yourself | Free |
| Single-purpose search extensions | Message text on ChatGPT only | Varies, usually keyword only | Matches; no folders, export or tags | Free or a small one-off |
| AI Toolbox (Free) | Every message in every conversation | None | Highlighted snippets, 5 per query, tag, archive or delete results | Free |
| AI Toolbox (Premium) | Every message, plus Gemini, Claude and Grok | Exact, role, date range, include/exclude, titles only | Unlimited, with folder filing, export and findings export | $9.99/mo or $99 lifetime |
The same search ships on the Gemini, Claude and Grok modules, and one All Access Lifetime purchase unlocks Advanced search and Search all platforms on all four.
Use cases
Works best with folders
Pair search with ChatGPT folders and move every match into a project folder in one pass.
Add to Chrome, freePrivacy
AI Toolbox builds the search index in IndexedDB on your device and every query runs there. Conversation content never reaches our servers; the only account detail that does is the email used to verify a Premium plan.
Pricing
Free covers full-text search with 5 results per query. Premium removes the cap and adds Advanced search, folder filing and export from results, and findings export on ChatGPT. All Access does the same across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, paid once. Not an AI subscription: you keep using your own ChatGPT account.
Free
$0forever
Premium
$9.99/month
LifetimeMost popular
$99one-time
Pays back in under 10 months of Premium.
Get Lifetime AccessAll Access LifetimeBest value
$199one-time
Teams$15/seat/month
All Premium features across the four modules · Admin dashboard · Team analytics · $12/seat/mo billed annually · 14-day free trial
Refunds follow the refund policy; renewals are not refundable. Premium unlocks on the ChatGPT account whose email you enter at checkout, so use the address you sign in to chatgpt.com with.
AI Toolbox holds a 4.7/5 rating on the Chrome Web Store. Read current reviews on the Chrome Web Store listing.
FAQ
ChatGPT's sidebar search matches conversation titles and lists them; it does not show the sentence that matched, has no filters, and cannot act on results. AI Toolbox adds a Search History panel that indexes every message of every conversation in your browser and searches the text itself, with the matching message highlighted and a link into the chat.
For searching message text, AI Toolbox (formerly ChatGPT Toolbox) is the most-installed option on the Chrome Web Store, with 40,000+ users and a 4.7/5 rating, and search is free with 5 results per query. Single-purpose extensions such as Searchable ChatGPT do search too; the difference is what happens after a match: AI Toolbox lets you tag, archive, file into folders or export the results, and the same install searches Gemini, Claude and Grok.
Yes. Full-text search, highlighted snippets, match counts, recent searches, the Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F shortcut, and Tag, Archive and Delete on up to 5 selected results per batch are on the free plan, with 5 results per query. Premium ($9.99 per month) or Lifetime ($99 one-time) removes the cap and adds Advanced search, Move to Folder and Export on results, findings export and Search all platforms.
Cmd+Shift+F on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+F on Windows and Linux, from any page on chatgpt.com. The panel opens with the input focused. Search History is also an entry in the floating AI Toolbox menu and in the Cmd/Ctrl+K command palette. Search all platforms has its own browser-level chord, Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Period, that works from any tab.
With Premium, yes. Advanced search adds an Exact Match toggle, Questions or Answers role pills, past week, month and year pills plus a custom from-to date range, Must include and Exclude chips with All or Any matching, and a Titles only switch. On the free plan a plain query searches everything with no filter applied, so nothing is silently hidden.
Tick any results and use the bulk bar: Tag, Archive and Delete are free for up to 5 conversations per batch; Move to Folder and Export as TXT, Markdown, JSON or PDF are Premium. Findings export goes further and exports only the passages that matched, as Markdown or TXT, with a link back to each conversation.
Yes, with Premium on the modules involved or All Access. Search all platforms runs one query across every AI you have switched it on for, groups results by platform and deep-links each match. The unified index is built on your device, is off by default, and is purged when you turn it off.
No. The index lives in IndexedDB in your browser and every query runs there. Conversation content is never stored on our servers; only what you build in the extension, such as folders, prompts and tags, syncs to your AI Toolbox account, encrypted at rest. Signing in to a different ChatGPT account clears the previous account's local caches first.
Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, Vivaldi and any other Chromium-based browser, from a single Chrome Web Store install. Firefox and Safari are not supported.
40,000+ users · 4.7/5 on the Chrome Web Store
Install AI Toolbox, open chatgpt.com, press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F and run your first full-text search before you decide on anything else.
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