OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT to surface information from past conversations

ChatGPT can now surface information from a user’s entire chat history more reliably, addressing one of the platform’s long-standing usability issues, following a new system update rolled out to Plus and Pro subscribers.

With the update, subscribers can ask questions that reference any past conversation, including chats dating back to when their account was first created. While ChatGPT has always stored user chat history and offered a basic search function, the feature has often proved inconsistent in practice, particularly for users with dozens or hundreds of similar threads accumulated over months or years.

The update, internally referred to as PersonalContextAgentTool, improves how the platform retrieves and applies information from earlier conversations. Rather than requiring users to manually search through past chats, ChatGPT can now respond to direct prompts that depend on previous discussions, such as revisiting a recipe mentioned weeks earlier or refining a fitness routine created months before.

A key aspect of the update is increased transparency. When ChatGPT draws information from an earlier conversation, it now presents the relevant chat as a clickable reference, allowing users to open the original thread, review the context and verify where specific details originated. This change positions the tool more clearly as a searchable personal knowledge base rather than an opaque retrieval system.

The improvement represents a significant quality-of-life upgrade for long-term users who rely on ChatGPT as an ongoing archive of ideas, notes and plans, and reduces friction for projects that evolve across multiple conversations instead of a single chat session.

However, the update arrives after similar features were introduced by competitors. Google’s Gemini added the ability to reference past conversations in February 2025, giving its users context-aware continuity for nearly a year, placing ChatGPT in a catch-up position on conversation memory even as it maintains an edge in other capabilities.

The update comes as OpenAI continues to focus on broader platform improvements, including the rollout of GPT-5 and a subsequent ChatGPT-5.1 update, which prioritised faster responses, a more conversational tone and expanded personality options.