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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Geography
Geography ChatGPT Plugins were the subset of third party plugins published in the ChatGPT Plugins store between March 2023 and April 2024 that focused on maps, coordinates, satellite imagery, demographic and census data, country level statistics, and other forms of structured spatial information. Unlike the travel category, which had two inaugural launch partners on March 23, 2023, geography was an emergent category that filled in over the following months as independent developers and companies such as TomTom shipped plugins on the same OpenAPI based contract. Operated by OpenAI as part of the plugin program for ChatGPT, the category was the canonical place where a chat session could ask for a map image, a country comparison, or a census slice and receive a structured answer rather than a model generated estimate. The plugin framework was deprecated for new conversations on March 19, 2024 and shut down on April 9, 2024, succeeded by Custom GPTs and the GPT Store. This article is a historical reference for the period during which a large language model could call into live geographic services through an open plugin contract.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023 in a blog post titled "ChatGPT plugins." The post described plugins as a way to let ChatGPT "access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services." The launch slate listed eleven external partners alongside two first party plugins (a Browsing tool and a Code Interpreter sandbox) and an open source Retrieval Plugin reference implementation. None of the eleven inaugural external partners was a dedicated geography plugin in the narrow sense, but Wolfram exposed Wolfram Alpha's curated geography knowledge base from day one. Dedicated geography plugins arrived later, mostly between mid May and early September 2023, after the plugin store opened to the wider Plus user base.
Access at launch was gated behind a waitlist for ChatGPT Plus subscribers. On May 12, 2023 OpenAI announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and the plugin store opened broadly on May 19, 2023. At OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023 the company introduced Custom GPTs and announced that plugins would eventually be retired in favour of GPTs and their tool calling layer, called Actions. On March 19, 2024 OpenAI sent the formal deprecation notice to plugin developers, and on April 9, 2024 plugins were turned off for end users. The official help center notice was titled "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta" and pointed users to GPTs and the GPT Store for equivalent functionality.
The key dates for the geography category are summarised below.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces plugins. Wolfram is the only inaugural partner with a deep geography knowledge base. |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI announces general availability of plugins for ChatGPT Plus subscribers. |
| May 19, 2023 | Plugin store opens to all Plus subscribers. |
| June 20, 2023 | Earth (from earth-plugin.com) and BlockAtlas are added to the plugin store. |
| July 14, 2023 | TomTom launches the first plugin from a dedicated location and mapping company. |
| September 1, 2023 | Maps Pro is added to the plugin store. |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces Custom GPTs and Actions. |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens. |
| March 19, 2024 | OpenAI formally deprecates the plugins beta for new conversations. |
| April 9, 2024 | The plugin store and runtime are turned off for end users. |
A geography plugin was server software that exposed an HTTP API to the chatbot. Like every plugin, it consisted of two artefacts on the developer's domain: a manifest file named ai-plugin.json served at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json, and an OpenAPI specification describing the endpoints. ChatGPT used the manifest to describe the plugin to the GPT-4 model in natural language and the OpenAPI document to plan and validate calls.
Capabilities clustered into a few patterns: map image generation from coordinates or place names, with optional GeoJSON overlays for markers, paths, and polygons; geocoding and reverse geocoding between strings and latitude longitude pairs; thematic data retrieval that returned demographic or economic figures and rendered them on a choropleth; routing and points of interest searches; and curated knowledge lookup against a structured source such as Wolfram Alpha. Almost no geography plugin produced an interactive web map inside the ChatGPT interface. The standard pattern was to return a static image rendered server side, sometimes with a deep link to a richer interactive view on the partner's own site.
The plugins below are the best documented entries in the category between March and September 2023.
TomTom launched its ChatGPT plugin on July 14, 2023 and was identified by the company as the first plugin from a dedicated location and mapping firm. It gave ChatGPT access to TomTom's mapping, traffic, and points of interest data, with a stated goal of making answers to location queries more accurate than what a large language model could produce on its own.
It exposed several functions: a search endpoint for points of interest by location or address; a search along route endpoint for points of interest near a corridor; a route calculation endpoint that returned a polyline between two or more locations with options for fastest, shortest, and most fuel efficient routes; a waypoint optimisation endpoint that reordered intermediate stops; an incident details endpoint for current traffic events; and two map preview endpoints that returned static map images either between coordinate boundaries or along a calculated route. It answered questions such as "plan a road trip from San Francisco to Yosemite avoiding tolls" or "is the route from London to Brighton currently delayed." Because it returned both structured data and a map image, ChatGPT could narrate a route and show it on a map in one response.
The Earth plugin, hosted at earth-plugin.com, was added to the plugin store on June 20, 2023. It was a dedicated map image generator and exposed three functions: mapFromCoordinates, which produced a map image from a latitude and longitude with options for zoom, bearing, pitch, and style; mapFromLocation, which did the same from a place name; and getCoordinates, which returned a latitude and longitude for any location string and was the geocoding endpoint.
The plugin supported six visual styles named light, dark, streets, outdoors, satellite, and satellite streets, and accepted GeoJSON for markers, paths, and polygons overlaid on the rendered image. The bearing and pitch parameters allowed for tilted three dimensional looking views of cities, mountains, and coastlines rather than the flat top down view of a typical web map. Earth also returned a Google Maps deep link alongside the image so that a user who wanted to pan and zoom further could continue in a familiar client. Because Earth only generated images and did not retrieve data, it was often combined with another plugin that supplied the underlying numbers.
BlockAtlas was added to the plugin store on June 20, 2023, the same day as Earth. It wrapped United States Census Bureau data and exposed two functions: nearestVars, which performed a semantic search across the catalogue of census variables for a natural language query such as "median income by county in Nebraska," and getMapAndData, which returned both a map image and the underlying numbers for a chosen variable across a chosen geography. The geography parameter accepted the values STATE, COUNTY, CITY, ZIP_CODE, COUNTIES_WITHIN_STATE, STATES_WITHIN_USA, COUNTIES_WITHIN_USA, and USA, letting a user ask for a single value for a single place, a comparison across all counties of a state, all states of the country, or any other supported combination. The plugin did not require authentication and was free to use. BlockAtlas was the geography category's clearest example of structured data retrieval as opposed to map rendering, and was useful for journalists, researchers, and students who needed quick access to census data without learning the underlying API.
Maps Pro was added to the plugin store on September 1, 2023 and was a second dedicated map generator alongside Earth. It exposed three commands: createFromAddress, which produced a map with markers from a list of addresses; createFromCoords, which did the same from latitude and longitude pairs; and createWithPath, which displayed a route between two locations with selectable travel modes. The emphasis was on multi marker maps suitable for itineraries, listings, and similar uses. In practice it was used in the same conversational positions as Earth, and the choice often came down to styling or path semantics.
The Wolfram plugin was one of the eleven external partners present on March 23, 2023 and the only inaugural plugin with a deep curated geography knowledge base. It exposed the Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Language stack, including country profiles, demographic indicators, geography of mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans, time zones and calendars, and computational functions such as great circle distance, sunrise and sunset times, and elevation queries. A user could ask "what is the highest mountain in each Andean country" or "how far is Reykjavik from Buenos Aires along a great circle" and Wolfram returned both a structured answer and a small image such as a flag or comparison chart. Although marketing emphasised computation and mathematics, in the geography category Wolfram functioned as the closest thing to an encyclopaedic factual reference present in the plugin store throughout the program's life. A companion product, the Wolfram Plugin Kit announced by Stephen Wolfram in late April 2023, lowered the barrier for third party developers to build their own plugins on top of Wolfram Language.
After general availability on May 19, 2023, independent developers published a long tail of geography adjacent plugins covering weather lookups by city or coordinates (notably MixerBox Weather, which supported more than 200,000 cities), country fact retrievals, currency conversion, and small map generators built on the same general purpose APIs used by Earth and Maps Pro. Because this wiki only documents plugins that can be cross referenced to a primary or near primary source, the article does not enumerate them. Most shut down or migrated to GPT Actions after April 2024.
Four workflow patterns dominated the geography category. The first was illustrated answer, the Earth and Maps Pro flow: the user asked about a place and the plugin attached a styled map image to the textual answer. The second was data retrieval and visualisation, the BlockAtlas flow, where ChatGPT picked the right variable and the plugin returned the data plus a choropleth. The third was navigation and routing, the TomTom flow, where the plugin returned a route polyline with step instructions and live traffic. The fourth was curated knowledge lookup, the Wolfram flow, where the plugin returned a small dataset presented as a table.
A single conversation often combined patterns through the three plugin per chat limit. A user could enable Earth, BlockAtlas, and Wolfram together for a county level demographic study with a map, or enable TomTom, Earth, and a travel plugin to plan and visualise a road trip. Prompt engineering tricks such as "only call the plugin when you need fresh data" were widely shared to keep latency and cost manageable.
OpenAI's public reasons for ending the plugin program all applied to the geography category. Discovery was a problem with several hundred plugins in the store: a user who wanted a map had to choose between Earth, Maps Pro, TomTom, and smaller alternatives without strong signals about which was best. The three plugin per conversation limit forced a session to choose between mapping, demographic data, and routing rather than combine all three. Reliability varied, particularly for plugins that wrapped third party tile servers or census APIs with their own rate limits. The plugin contract exposed only API endpoints with no instructions, knowledge files, or persistent identity, so a user looking for a "county data assistant" wanted a branded GPT rather than a raw API. The program also offered no revenue share for developers, which the successor program addressed.
The successor is the combination of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store. A GPT bundles instructions, optional knowledge files, and Actions (the new name for the plugin style API layer). Where the plugin store presented several single purpose geography plugins, the GPT Store presented a smaller number of branded assistants combining those calls behind one identity. Actions use the same OpenAPI format, so most geography developers ported their backends to Actions inside a Custom GPT with limited code changes.
The table contrasts the geography category before and after the transition.
| Aspect | Plugin era (2023 to 2024) | GPT era (2024 onward) |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Flat plugin store inside ChatGPT | Branded GPTs in the GPT Store |
| Activation | User toggled up to three plugins per chat | User opened a single GPT |
| Backend contract | OpenAPI plus ai-plugin.json manifest | OpenAPI plus a GPT configuration |
| Persistence of identity | None. Plugins were stateless API wrappers | GPTs carry instructions and knowledge across sessions |
| Map output | Static image returned per call | Same static image pattern, often inside a richer GPT |
| Revenue model | None for developers | Revenue share announced for GPT Store |
| Migration cost for developers | n/a | Generally low, since the same OpenAPI contract carries over |