May 9 (Reuters) - OpenAI plans to announce its

artificial intelligence-powered search product on Monday,

according to two sources familiar with the matter, raising the

stakes in its competition with search king Google.

The announcement date, though subject to change, has not

been previously reported. Bloomberg and the Information have

reported that Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI is working on a

search product to potentially compete with Alphabet's

Google and with Perplexity, a well-funded AI search startup.

OpenAI declined to comment.

The announcement could be timed a day before the Tuesday

start of Google's annual I/O conference, where the tech giant is

expected to unveil a slew of AI-related products.

OpenAI's search product is an extension of its flagship

ChatGPT product, and enables ChatGPT to pull in direct

information from the Web and include citations, according to

Bloomberg. ChatGPT is OpenAI's chatbot product that uses the

company's cutting-edge AI models to generate human-like

responses to text prompts.

Industry observers have long called ChatGPT an alternative

for gathering online information, though it has struggled with

providing accurate and real-time information from the Web.

OpenAI earlier gave it an integration with Microsoft's ( MSFT ) Bing for

paid subscribers. Meanwhile, Google has announced generative AI

features for its own namesake engine.

Startup Perplexity, which has a valuation of $1 billion, was

founded by a former OpenAI researcher, and has gained traction

through providing an AI-native search interface that shows

citations in results and images as well as text in its

responses. It has 10 million monthly active users, according to

a January blog post from the startup.

At the time, OpenAI's ChatGPT product was called the fastest

application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users after

it launched in late 2022. However, worldwide traffic to

ChatGPT's website has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past

year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according

to analytics firm Similarweb, and the AI company is under

pressure to expand its user base.

An earlier attempt to bring updated and real-world

information in to ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was retired

in April, according to a help center posting on OpenAI's

website.