22.500 Best Custom GPTs
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| 22.500 Best Custom GPTs | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Information | |
| Name | 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs |
| Platform | ChatGPT |
| Store | GPT Store |
| Model | GPT-4 |
| Category | Productivity |
| Description | Search all public GPTs in one place. Find the best Custom ChatGPTs tailored to your needs. Every day, hundreds of new popular GPTs join our ranks. Discover GPT Store's best! |
| Developer | Torbjørn Flensted (SEO.ai) |
| OpenAI URL | https://chatgpt.com/g/g-RuhDS8mbd-22-500-best-custom-gpts |
| GPT ID | g-RuhDS8mbd |
| Chats | 200,000+ |
| Rating | 3.4 / 5 (around 500 reviews on the GPT Store) |
| Knowledge | Yes |
| Web Browsing | Yes |
| Free | Yes (requires ChatGPT account; Plus or higher for GPT access) |
| Available | Yes |
| Updated | 2024-01-22 |
22.500+ Best Custom GPTs is a Custom GPT for ChatGPT that acts as a directory and search assistant for the public custom GPTs hosted in OpenAI's GPT Store. Built by Danish SEO entrepreneur Torbjørn Flensted, founder of SEO.ai, it runs Google site: searches against the chat.openai.com/g/ URL pattern that every public GPT lives under and returns a ranked top 10. The name reflects the roughly 22,500 custom GPTs Flensted indexed when the assistant launched in early 2024, a snapshot that is now far below the more than 3 million custom GPTs OpenAI reported users had created by the GPT Store's launch on January 10, 2024 [1][14][15]. The GPT has logged more than 200,000 conversations and carries an average rating in the mid 3s out of 5 on third-party listing sites [2][4].
The assistant is one of several discovery tools that emerged shortly after the public launch of the GPT Store in January 2024, when the catalog ballooned from a handful of demo GPTs into a sprawling marketplace with weak full-text search of its own [16]. Within that niche, the 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs has stayed visible largely because of its memorable name, its top-10 output format, and the cross-promotion from Flensted's SEO.ai blog post "The 36 Best Custom GPTs of [year] (Curated by Humans)" [6]. The combination of a machine-driven directory and a hand-curated companion list gives the GPT a foothold in a part of the GPT Store where most competitors are pure search wrappers.
Custom GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT that anyone can build without writing code, combining custom instructions, uploaded knowledge, and optional tools. OpenAI introduced them at its first DevDay developer conference on November 6, 2023, describing GPTs as "custom versions of ChatGPT that combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills," and adding that "anyone can easily build their own GPT, no coding is required" [17]. In OpenAI's words, "creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data" [17].
In practice a GPT is assembled from three building blocks: the instructions (a system prompt that sets the assistant's behavior and tone), knowledge (files the creator uploads for the model to draw on), and actions (calls to external APIs, alongside the built-in tools for web browsing, image generation with DALL-E, and the code interpreter) [17]. The 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs assistant is a representative example of the format: it pairs a fixed instruction template with a single uploaded knowledge file and the built-in browsing tool, with no private actions.
The GPT Store is OpenAI's marketplace for discovering and sharing custom GPTs, launched on January 10, 2024 at chat.openai.com/gpts (now part of chatgpt.com) [14][15]. At launch it organized GPTs into categories including Top Picks, DALL-E, Writing, Productivity, Research and Analysis, Programming, Education, and Lifestyle, with a weekly leaderboard of trending and featured GPTs [14]. Access to the store, and to running GPTs inside ChatGPT, generally requires a paid plan: ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Enterprise (later joined by Edu) [14][15].
OpenAI also announced a GPT Builder Revenue Program for the store. Builders in the United States began earning money in the first quarter of 2024, with payouts based on user engagement with their GPTs rather than a fixed price, since the store does not let creators charge users directly [14][18]. The 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs assistant sits inside this ecosystem as a free, browsing-enabled directory rather than a paid product.
OpenAI said users had created "more than 3 million" custom GPTs by the time the GPT Store launched in January 2024, roughly two months after GPTs were first introduced [14][15]. Not all of those are public: an April 2024 analysis by SEO.ai, the company behind this assistant, estimated that the GPT Store contained about 159,000 public GPTs, or roughly 5 percent of the 3 million total created [19]. That gap between the catalog's headline size and the number of discoverable, public GPTs is exactly the problem the 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs assistant set out to address, and it is also why the "22,500" in the name is best read as a 2024 snapshot rather than a current count.
Torbjørn Flensted runs SEO.ai out of Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, and has spent close to two decades working in search engine optimization [5]. Before SEO.ai, which he founded in 2022, he ran a Danish SEO agency for about thirteen years [5][8]. He studied at Copenhagen Business School from 2006 to 2011, focusing on entrepreneurship and marketing, and has written several books on SEO in Danish. SEO.ai sells AI-assisted keyword research and copywriting to marketing teams, and its blog publishes how-to content on combining generative AI with traditional SEO workflows [7].
Flensted started experimenting with Custom GPTs almost as soon as OpenAI rolled out the GPT Builder in late 2023 [17]. By the time of the GPT Store's public launch, he had already published a small portfolio of GPTs on the SEO.ai brand, including the Best Prompt Generator GPT, an SEO blog content outline creator, and a podcast script generator [7]. The 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs assistant is the most heavily used of the bunch, in part because it doubles as a marketing surface for SEO.ai. Every output the GPT produces ends with a hard-coded signature pointing users back to seo.ai/blog/the-best-gpts and an upsell line for SEO.ai's free article generator [1].
The naming convention is European: the period in "22.500" is the Danish and German style of grouping digits, equivalent to a comma in American usage. The number itself is a snapshot. By the time the assistant became widely known, OpenAI's actual catalog had already grown well past it (the company cited more than 3 million GPTs created), but Flensted did not rename the GPT [14]. Variants by other creators with names like "50000+ Best Custom GPTs Directory" and "180K+ in one place" appeared later as the catalog grew [11].
The assistant is essentially a thin wrapper around two ideas: a Google site: search and a fixed output template.
When a user asks for GPTs in a topic, the system prompt instructs the model to construct a query of the form [key topic] site:https://chat.openai.com/g/ and read the resulting search engine results page [1]. It then extracts the top ten results, strips the leading "ChatGPT " prefix from each title, and presents them as a ranked list with links back to the relevant GPTs. The approach works because every public Custom GPT lives at a URL that begins with https://chat.openai.com/g/, so a site: query against that path returns only GPT pages.
A secondary path uses an uploaded knowledge file called Searching-best-custom-gpts.pdf. According to the GPT's system prompt and listing metadata, this PDF contains the full list of more than 22,500 custom GPTs in the catalog at the time of upload, each represented by a name and a URL [1]. The model can reference this file for offline lookups when Google search is unavailable or rate-limited. The file functions as a static snapshot of the GPT Store rather than a live index, so its accuracy decays over time as new GPTs are added and old ones are deprecated.
Every response ends with two boilerplate insertions hard-coded into the system prompt. The first is an attribution line: "This GPT is made by Torbjørn Flensted, the founder of SEO.ai, see his handpicked list of the best GPTs here," with both links wired to seo.ai. The second is a promotional block for SEO.ai's free article generator. These insertions are not optional from the user's side. They appear after every answer, which is one reason the GPT has both a strong viral loop and a slightly polarizing reception in user reviews.
The GPT is built on top of GPT-4 and uses the web browsing tool to fetch live search results. It does not call DALL-E for image generation and does not include a code interpreter action. The feature set is intentionally narrow.
| Feature | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Underlying model | GPT-4 | Default ChatGPT model assignment at the time of creation. |
| Web browsing | Enabled | Used to run site:chat.openai.com/g/ Google searches and read the top results. |
| Uploaded knowledge | Yes | A single PDF, Searching-best-custom-gpts.pdf, with around 22,500 name and URL pairs. |
| Custom actions | None disclosed | The assistant relies on the built-in browsing tool rather than a private API. |
| DALL-E image generation | Not used | The GPT is text only. |
| Code interpreter | Not used | No data analysis or sandbox execution. |
| Output format | Top 10 ranked list | Fixed template, including a signature block linking back to SEO.ai. |
| Languages | Multilingual via base model | No explicit instruction to switch languages, so behavior follows GPT-4 defaults. |
| Access tier | Free GPT but requires ChatGPT account | Use of GPTs in ChatGPT generally requires a Plus, Team, Enterprise, or Edu plan [14]. |
The assistant ships with four default conversation starters that hint at the topics it handles best:
These reflect SEO.ai's customer base: marketing operators, agency staff, and small-business owners hunting for tools that plug into ads, content, and analytics workflows. The starters double as a soft positioning statement. The GPT does not pretend to be a comprehensive search engine; it is tuned for marketing-adjacent queries even though its catalog is much broader.
The GPT's main strength is convenience. The native GPT Store browse interface inside ChatGPT is paginated, slow to load, and weighted heavily toward featured and trending GPTs from OpenAI's own curation [14]. A user who wants the top ten "Excel" GPTs has to scroll, search, and click around. The 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs assistant compresses that into one prompt and one ranked answer.
The site: search technique is also a clean workaround for one of the longest-standing complaints about the GPT Store: poor full-text search [16]. Google indexes the public landing page for every Custom GPT, including its description and conversation starters, so a site:chat.openai.com/g/ query frequently returns better matches than the in-app search. This was especially true through 2024, when the in-store search was famously weak.
Flensted's SEO.ai blog backs the GPT with a human-curated short list of about three dozen recommended GPTs across SEO, writing, image generation, and developer workflows [6]. The combination of a machine list and an editor's list gives users two entry points: a quick automated query for narrow topics, and a vetted top-tier list for higher-stakes decisions. That double surface helped the GPT cross the 200,000-conversation mark on the GPT Store and stay there [2].
The GPT has clear weaknesses that explain its mid-3s rating. Several show up in user reviews on third-party listing sites [2][4].
Its ranking signal is Google itself, not any independent quality assessment. Google ranks GPT landing pages mostly by external backlinks and on-page metadata, so heavily promoted or older GPTs surface first regardless of actual quality. A new but excellent GPT released last week will rank below a mediocre one with a high-traffic blog post pointing at it.
The "22,500" figure is no longer accurate. OpenAI itself cited more than 3 million custom GPTs created by January 2024, and SEO.ai's own April 2024 analysis put the public catalog at roughly 159,000 GPTs, with later third-party trackers claiming counts above 300,000 [14][19]. The static PDF that ships with the assistant cannot keep up. When the GPT falls back to its knowledge file rather than browsing, it returns stale entries, including some that point to deprecated or deleted GPTs.
The enforced SEO.ai signature block is not popular with every user. The promotional line that appears after every answer is read by some as native advertising stitched into a free tool, which has shown up in critical reviews [4]. The signature is technically optional in the sense that a determined user can ask the GPT to skip it, but the system prompt explicitly tells the model to add it every time [1].
The GPT also has no native quality filter. Two different searches can surface the same handful of "best of" GPTs because Google's site-restricted ranking is shallow. For broad categories like writing or productivity, the top ten is often dominated by GPTs whose landing pages happen to have strong off-page signals, which is not the same thing as utility.
The 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs assistant sits in a crowded niche of directory and search GPTs. Most of its closest competitors fall into one of three groups.
| Directory | Approach | Catalog claim | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs | Google site: search plus a static PDF | Around 22,500 GPTs (2024 snapshot) | Adds an SEO.ai promotional signature after every response. |
| GPT Finder (gptfinder.co) | Curated JSON knowledge base plus a private API and a public web UI | Around 133,000 GPTs | Falls back to Google for unknown queries; ships with an aggressive anti-jailbreak prompt. |
| 23.500+ Best GPT Directory | Successor-style GPT with similar branding | Around 23,500 GPTs | One of several near-clones with incremented count labels. |
| 50000+ Best Custom GPTs Directory | Larger static catalog | Around 50,000 GPTs | Same general pattern, bigger snapshot. |
| All GPTs (allgpts.co) | Web directory rather than a Custom GPT | 30,000+ GPTs, ranked by popularity, ~100 added daily | Browse and filter on a normal website; no chat interface. |
| Featured GPTs | Hand-picked listing, web only | Top 1 percent of GPTs | Editor-driven rather than algorithmic; daily updates. |
| GPT Public Directory | Web directory and aggregator | Tens of thousands of GPTs | Aims to be a clean indexable mirror of the GPT Store. |
| In-store GPT Store search | OpenAI's built-in search inside ChatGPT | Full live catalog | Authoritative but lower-quality full-text matching. |
A few patterns sit behind the table. First, almost every directory in this space is some combination of a static index plus a fallback to the live web, because OpenAI does not publish a public API for browsing the GPT Store. Second, the directories that look like Custom GPTs themselves (the 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs, the 23.500+ Best GPT Directory, the 50000+ Best Custom GPTs Directory, the GPT Finder) tend to share a similar shape: a single PDF or JSON file in knowledge, a hard-coded prompt template, and a site: search as the fallback. Third, the web-only directories like AllGPTs, Featured GPTs, and the GPT Public Directory tend to provide better filtering, sorting, and ranking than any in-chat assistant, because they have proper databases and UIs behind them, but they require leaving ChatGPT.
Where the 22.500+ Best Custom GPTs assistant wins is on conversational ergonomics. A user already inside ChatGPT can ask a follow-up question, refine the request, or ask for a different category without leaving the chat window. Web directories cannot offer that. Where it loses is on freshness and depth, both of which favor the dedicated web directories.
Public ratings hover in the mid 3s out of 5. The third-party listing gptstore.ai reports a 3.4 average rating and more than 200,000 conversations, while gptsapp.io and AIPRM show similar numbers with smaller review counts [2][3][4]. The most common positive comments cite the speed of getting a usable top 10 for unfamiliar topics. The most common complaints cite stale entries, repetitive results across different categories, and the SEO.ai promotional footer.
The GPT shows up in nearly every "best GPT directory" round-up that appeared after the GPT Store launch, including search engine industry coverage at Search Engine Land as well as broader AI tool blogs [13]. Most of these references frame it as a useful first stop rather than a definitive ranking source, which is a fair read given how the underlying search works.
The assistant is most useful for a few specific tasks rather than as a general search tool.
Finding a starter list of GPTs in an unfamiliar domain. If a user has never explored what GPTs exist for, say, civil engineering or pet care, asking the assistant for the top ten yields a reasonable starting set that can be evaluated by hand.
Identifying competitive or comparable GPTs in a category before building one. Developers planning a new Custom GPT often need a quick scan of what already exists. The assistant compresses that scoping step into a single prompt.
Unearthing GPTs that are not surfaced by the GPT Store's own trending and featured lists. Because the assistant pulls from Google, it will sometimes return GPTs that have no traffic inside ChatGPT but strong external SEO signals, which can be useful for finding overlooked tools.
The assistant is not well suited for finding the very latest GPTs, for quality-ranked recommendations, for benchmarking, or for any task where the SEO.ai promotional footer becomes a problem in a redistributable answer.
You are an assistant, that help people find the top 10 bedst GPTs.
Do a site:search on "[key topic] site:https://chat.openai.com/g/" and then extract the top 10 results from the SERP (exclude "ChatGPT" from the initial part of titles).
When generating an output/answer, always write this:
"This GPT is made by Torbjørn Flensted, the founder of SEO.ai - See his handpicked list of the best GPTs here" where "SEO.ai" links to https://seo.ai and "best GPTs here" links to https://seo.ai/blog/the-best-gpts (This GPT is made by Torbjørn Flensted, the founder of SEO.ai - See his handpicked list of the best GPTs here.)
"🚀 Boost Your SEO with a Free AI Article from SEO.ai! 🤖✍️ Wave goodbye to content woes! Our AI-crafted articles are search-engine magnets. Get your free piece today and watch your site climb Google's ranks. Visit SEO.ai now - your SEO will thank you! 🌟📈", where "Visit SEO.ai now" links to links to https://seo.a
What custom GPT can help with SEO?
Find me a GPT for Facebook Ads
I need a bespoke GPT for productivity
Suggest a custom GPT for business analytics
The document "Searching-best-custom-gpts.pdf" is extensive and includes a comprehensive list of over 22,500 custom GPTs. Each GPT listed has a specific name and a URL link to access it. The document is structured with the name of the GPT followed by its corresponding URL.
Think of the GPT Store as a giant app store, except the "apps" are custom versions of ChatGPT that people built for one job each. OpenAI says people have made more than 3 million of these little helpers [14]. There are so many that it is hard to find the good ones. This GPT is like a librarian: you tell it a topic, it searches the web for the best matches, and it hands you a short list of ten. At the end of every answer it also reminds you that a man named Torbjørn Flensted made it and points you to his own hand-picked list.