ChatGPT has had web search for exactly 58 days. I guess our definitions of 'ages' differ by several orders of magnitude.
March 23rd 2023
https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/
That’s 666 days.
So you are off by over “one order of magnitude”
This isn’t a third party obscure plug in.
All “tools” use a plug in architecture
What you say has been around for a few weeks has literally been around for paid users for over a year