Beyond ChatGPT’s Extension: How to Redirect Safari Searches to Any LLM

xSearch for Safari.

Earlier this week, OpenAI’s official ChatGPT app for iPhone and iPad was updated with a native Safari extension that lets you forward any search query from Safari’s address bar to ChatGPT Search. It’s a clever approach: rather than waiting for Apple to add a native ChatGPT Search option to their list of default search engines (if they ever will), OpenAI leveraged extensions’ ability to intercept queries in the address bar and redirect them to ChatGPT whenever you type something and press Return.

However, this is not the only option you have if you want to redirect your Safari search queries to a search engine other than the one that’s set as your default. While the solution I’ll propose below isn’t as frictionless as OpenAI’s native extension, it gets the job done, and until other LLMs like Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Le Chat ship their own Safari extensions, you can use my approach to give Safari more AI search capabilities right now.

The trick is to use either Redirect Web or xSearch, both of which can be downloaded from the App Store. With these apps, you can either completely override the pre-installed search engines and redirect queries to any other website, or you can add keyword-based searches to Safari’s address bar while keeping your “regular” search engine the default option.

I first discovered Redirect Web thanks to Jason Snell at Six Colors 1, and I’ve been using it to redirect Discord.com web URLs to the native Discord app for iPad. As the name suggests, Redirect Web takes a URL, finds matches in it using regular expressions, and redirects parts of it to another URL.

Let me give you an example. In Redirect Web’s built-in gallery of potential redirects, I found the text string that matches any Google search:

https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?google\.(?:com|com\.[a-z]{2}|co\.[a-z]{2}|[a-z]{2})\/search\?(?:.*&)?q=([^&]*).*

That doesn’t look pretty or readable, but it works, and you don’t need to look at it too long. (RegEx can’t hurt you, but still.) That’s our ‘Redirect From’ field in the app. Say that Google is your device’s default search engine and you want to redirect all queries to the Claude web app. In the ‘Redirect To’ field, simply enter:

https://claude.ai/new?q=$1

Then, any search query you type into the Safari address bar will automatically open in the Claude web app after you press Return:

Typing the query in Safari’s address bar.

Which gets redirected to the Claude web app.

This is what the rule looks like in Redirect Web:

The Claude rule in Redirect Web.

Here are some of the URLs I’ve tested for other LLMs, which you can also set up in the app:

Le Chat: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q=$1

Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/search?q=$1

Microsoft Copilot: https://www.bing.com/search?showconv=1&sendquery=1&q=$1

There are plenty of options you can enable in Redirect Web, and lots of advanced matching you can perform if you know your way around RegEx. Fortunately, you don’t need to do anything else if you just want a simple redirect rule like this. Want to make this work for other LLMs? All you need to do is find their search query URLs (similar to the https://claude.ai/new?q= part above) and replicate the rule.

But what if you want to keep Google as your default search engine while also integrating Safari with LLM-based search engines that do not offer their own extensions? This is where xSearch comes in.

What’s unique about xSearch is that it gives you the ability to add search operators before your query to redirect a search from Google to something else. For example, if you type gpt MacStories in Safari with xSearch enabled, rather than searching Google, Safari will search for “MacStories” in ChatGPT Search.

These keywords are customizable, and the app ships with a built-in collection of LLM engines that you can activate with one tap. Claude – my favorite for assistive work at the moment, especially with the release of 3.7 Sonnet – is among the supported services, and I’ve added a cd operator to quickly forward a search from Google to Claude’s web UI. It works wonderfully.

Typing the keyword-based search in Safari…

…which gets redirected to Claude, where I can press Return to search.

I’ve personally stopped using ChatGPT (I primarily work with Gemini and Claude), so I’m not taking advantage of its extension. Furthermore, I prefer the keyword-based approach that lets me intentionally redirect a query from Safari to Claude since I still find traditional Google search superior for general-purpose queries. That’s why I use xSearch on my iPhone and iPad. However, I appreciate the RegEx-infused power of Redirect Web, which is a fantastic utility if you’re looking to perform all sorts of pattern-matching in Safari URLs.

You can find both xSearch and Redirect Web on the App Store.

Sometimes, my brain associates very specific blog posts with specific people for no particular reason. I just knew that Jason wrote about this app, and I had no idea it was more than two years ago. Brains are lovable weirdos. ↩