ChatGPT Projects history search does not find existing text in long project threads

Summary

ChatGPT Projects history search does not reliably find text that exists inside previous project conversation threads. This is especially noticeable in a project with many long threads.

I understand this repository may not be the perfect tracker for ChatGPT product bugs. I am filing this here as a public OpenAI GitHub report because I could not find a dedicated public GitHub issue tracker for ChatGPT Projects. If this is the wrong place, please route it to the appropriate ChatGPT product/search team or point me to the correct tracker.

Use case

I use a ChatGPT Project to help draft replies to customer comments and customer questions. The project has many conversation threads, and some threads are long because they include customer context, prior drafts, follow-up notes, and ongoing discussion.

In this workflow, being able to search old project conversations is important because I often need to find:

• A previous customer question or complaint.
• A phrase used by a customer.
• An earlier response draft.
• Context from a previous thread.
• Similar cases that were already discussed.

Problem

When I search for a phrase that I know exists in an older thread inside the project, ChatGPT search does not return the matching thread.

The text is still present in the conversation history. I can find it only by manually opening and browsing the old thread. However, search results do not surface that thread.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open ChatGPT.
2. Open a Project with many conversation threads.
3. Open an older thread and confirm a specific phrase exists in the conversation.
4. Return to ChatGPT history search or project search.
5. Search for the exact phrase, or for a distinctive substring of that phrase.
6. Observe that the thread containing the phrase is missing from the results.

Expected behavior

Search should find and return the project thread that contains the searched text.

For project workflows, search should ideally cover:

• All threads inside the project.
• Older threads.
• Long threads.
• Full message text, not only titles or summaries.
• Exact phrase matches.

Actual behavior

The relevant thread does not appear in search results, even though the phrase exists in the conversation history.

Impact

This significantly reduces the usefulness of ChatGPT Projects as a long-running workspace.

For customer-support or customer-response workflows, this creates several problems:

• Prior customer context becomes hard to retrieve.
• Similar customer questions cannot be found quickly.
• Response consistency becomes harder to maintain.
• Users may accidentally repeat work because previous drafts are hidden from search.
• Manual thread browsing becomes the only workaround.

Possible technical causes

I do not know the root cause, but the behavior seems consistent with one or more of these issues:

• Not all project threads are indexed.
• Older project threads are excluded from the search index.
• Very long threads are indexed only partially.
• Project search is searching metadata, titles, or summaries instead of full message content.
• Exact phrase search is unreliable inside project conversation history.
• The project-level history search index may be stale or incomplete.

Privacy note

I am not including real customer text in this public issue because those conversations may contain customer-identifying information. Sanitized examples can be provided through a private support channel if needed.

Suggested improvement

Please improve ChatGPT Projects search so users can reliably search across all project threads and find exact text inside conversation history, including long and older threads.