I’ve been using ChatGPT as a travel assistant for quite a while now. I run marathons and use that excuse to visit new places. I’m actually able to comfortably run a marathon race in the first place because I enlisted ChatGPT’s help. It’s all part of my desire to live healthier, and running those races is just the sort of challenge that helps me.
You need that context before I tell you that I use ChatGPT to plan travels all the time. I do it months in advance of each trip. What should I visit when I’m there? Will it require lots of walking? Where should I stay? How good is the transit system? Are there any city passes that cover must-see sights and public transport? I’d usually perform numerous searches to answer these questions. But now that ChatGPT is here, I have it act as my travel assistant. I ask all sorts of questions, start new chats, and then group related chats in a folder so I can easily reference them.
ChatGPT has been getting better over time. For example, I used ChatGPT Deep Research to plan museum visits in Tokyo. As detailed as that report might have been, however, it missed a critical piece of information: the map. OpenAI doesn’t have its own mapping service, so it can’t place those points of interest on a map. I still used Google Maps to plan my days based on the ChatGPT Deep Research report.
It turns out that OpenAI might have quietly given ChatGPT an upgrade I’ve always wanted. The AI can now show you maps listing the points of interest being discussed in a chat containing location-related data. The feature is new, as ChatGPT informed me, but it doesn’t really work all too reliably just yet.
The new maps feature has nothing to do with the improved image generation features that OpenAI brought to ChatGPT this week. The following screenshot comes from a recent chat with the AI about Annecy, a city in France.
At one point during my chat I asked about museums in the region, not expecting the AI to show me the map above. I asked the AI to give me museums in the area, focusing on walking distance first, and ChatGPT put them on the map for me.
That map is interactive. I can zoom in and out and click on the saved locations that ChatGPT marked. Each pin gives me brief information about that place of interest.
It’s like having Google Maps embedded in ChatGPT, only it’s not Google Maps. On that note, Google just brought Gemini Live chatting support to Google Maps, a feature ChatGPT can’t possibly replicate.
Back to my travel-assisting chat, I have no idea what map service that is. Based on my experience, it’s not Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Bing Maps.
When I asked the chatbot what the “map thing” was, ChatGPT said it was part of a “recent update where, whenever I retrieve location-based information using the web tool, it automatically generates a small visual map preview within my response.”
That’s an incredibly useful feature, as it gives me an immediate idea of what to expect. Rather than going to Google Maps for a visual representation, I can see it all in ChatGPT.
The chatbot said the feature is enabled when it provides location-specific recommendations or uses the web tool to find data that involves geographic locations. Great, again!
The problem is that the new feature doesn’t always work. I tried to trigger it again in other chats and the same chat, but it didn’t work. I will note that it was GPT-4.5 displaying the map above.
The model switched to GPT-4o, as you can see in the screenshots above, because I’ve reached the limit for GPT-4.5 replies for this month. ChatGPT switched to GPT-4o for all chats, including the ones I talked to the GPT-4.5 model.
Later, I asked the AI how it drew the map. Here’s what ChatGPT responded:
I didn’t manually draw the map—the visual map you saw earlier is an automatic feature provided by ChatGPT. When I use the web tool to search for or share location-specific information, the system automatically generates and inserts a small interactive map preview, typically pulled from Google Maps or Bing Maps.
But, again, the map doesn’t look like the current version of Google Maps or Bing Maps. While ChatGPT’s explanations for inserting map data into location-related chats make sense, especially if said data is “seamlessly provided by ChatGPT to enrich our conversation with interactive location context,” I can’t really take advantage of it. That’s because I can’t tell ChatGPT to give me a list of sights for a place and place them on a map. It doesn’t work that way.
I do hope that OpenAI is indeed looking to provide location information directly into chats. After all, we’re constantly looking for location information, and AI should support that sort of data. The problem here is that OpenAI doesn’t have a Google Maps service of its own.
On that note, Google has a big advantage over rivals thanks to the Gemini integration in Google Maps. I’d expect to see Google Maps data in Gemini chats in the future. When Apple is ready to roll out a Siri chatbot, it’ll also have Apple Maps data for chats.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep trying to make ChatGPT give me interactive maps in chats whenever I give the AI travel-related prompts. Hopefully, the AI will provide those maps more often than it does right now.
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