GPTs Works
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Last reviewed
May 11, 2026
Sources
8 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v4 · 2,198 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
| GPTs Works | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Information | |
| Name | GPTs Works |
| Type | Third-party GPT directory and search engine |
| Platform | Web, browser extension, ChatGPT |
| Store | GPT Store (companion directory) |
| Custom GPT model | GPT-4 |
| Custom GPT category | Custom directory/search GPT |
| Description | Third-party GPT directory with a website, vector search index, browser extension, and a Custom GPT for chat search. |
| Developer | idoubi (Cao Wei), all-in-aigc |
| Initial release | November 2023 |
| Source code | github.com/all-in-aigc/gpts-works |
| License | MIT (source code) |
| OpenAI URL (Custom GPT) | chat.openai.com/g/g-EBKM6RsBl-gpts-works |
| Chrome extension | GPTs Works on Chrome Web Store |
| Free | Yes |
| Updated | 2024-01-24 |
GPTs Works is a third-party directory and search engine for Custom GPTs, the user-built variants of ChatGPT that OpenAI introduced at its November 2023 DevDay. It consists of three pieces of software that share one database: a public website at gpts.works, a vector-search index system with an HTTP API, and a browser extension that injects third-party GPTs into ChatGPT's Explore sidebar. There is also a Custom GPT named GPTs Works inside the GPT Store itself, which calls the project's own API through a GPT Action so users can search the index without leaving a ChatGPT conversation.
The project was built by idoubi (real name Cao Wei), a Chinese full-stack engineer who left Tencent in October 2023 to work on indie products, and is released as open source under the all-in-aigc organization on GitHub. idoubi announced the open-source release on November 14, 2023, less than a week after OpenAI's DevDay keynote, making GPTs Works one of the first third-party GPT directories to ship. At its peak the index claimed to cover more than 20,000 third-party GPTs, which it advertised on the gpts.works home page as the headline feature alongside vector search.
GPTs Works is best understood as a workaround for discovery problems in OpenAI's own GPT Store, which launched in January 2024. The official store ranks GPTs by category and trending lists but does not expose a rich search API, so finding a niche GPT often involves scrolling. Third-party directories like GPTs Works, allgpts.co, and gptstore.ai emerged in late 2023 to fill that gap with crawled metadata and semantic search.
OpenAI announced Custom GPTs at DevDay on November 6, 2023. The launch let any ChatGPT Plus user package a system prompt, knowledge files, web browsing, DALL-E, the code interpreter, and external API actions into a shareable GPT with its own URL. A public GPT Store was promised for later but did not arrive until January 10, 2024. In the interim, the only way to find new GPTs was to copy share links from social media or comb through Twitter/X threads, which created an obvious gap for a directory service.
idoubi had just left Tencent the month before and was looking for an English-language product to launch as part of an experiment in building for the global market. In a Chinese-language post on his personal blog at idoubi.cc, he later described GPTs Works as his "first overseas product," written and shipped in a few days during the week after DevDay. The site went live in November 2023, was open-sourced on November 14, 2023, and the Chrome extension was published on November 22, 2023.
The project sits inside a broader push from idoubi who, after GPTs Works, went on to ship a string of AI side projects in 2024 including AI Wallpaper, AI Cover, ThinkAny, Pagen, PodLM, and ShipAny. Several live under the same all-in-aigc GitHub organization and share infrastructure choices with GPTs Works, including Next.js, Vercel hosting, and managed Postgres.
The public GitHub repository at github.com/all-in-aigc/gpts-works splits the project into three top-level packages: a Next.js website (~80% TypeScript by file count), a Python index system (~16% Python), and a browser extension built with Plasmo. They share a single source of truth for GPT metadata.
The website at gpts.works is a Next.js application written in TypeScript and deployed to Vercel. It renders featured GPTs on the home page, plus category pages, a search box, and individual GPT detail pages with the title, author name, short description, and a deep link back to the chat.openai.com URL. The frontend reads from Vercel Postgres, which stores GPT records: name, description, author, OpenAI ID, capabilities, and timestamps. Because GPTs Works does not run the GPTs themselves, every "open" button is just a redirect to a chat.openai.com link, so the directory adds no inference cost, no model hosting, and no separate authentication.
The index system is a Python service built with FastAPI. It owns the vector search behavior that the project advertises as its main differentiator from plain keyword directories. GPT titles and descriptions are embedded using OpenAI's text embedding models, then stored in Zilliz Cloud, the hosted version of the open-source Milvus vector database. At query time, a user's natural-language question ("I want a coding assistant GPT") is embedded by the same model and a nearest-neighbor lookup returns the top matching GPTs.
The service exposes a single POST endpoint, /v1/gpts/search, which accepts a JSON body containing a question field and returns a list of GPT records under data. The API is documented as an OpenAPI 3.1 schema and uses bearer-token authentication. The same schema is what the Custom GPT inside ChatGPT calls through a GPT Action, so the public website, the browser extension, and the chat surface all hit the same backend.
The browser extension is built with Plasmo, a framework for cross-browser extension development. It targets Chrome, and ships in the Chrome Web Store as "GPTs Works" under the developer name idoubi (contact email me@idoubi.cc). The store listing shows version 1.0.3, published November 22, 2023, with a footprint of around 81 KiB and a small user base of fewer than 1,000 active installs.
The extension injects an extra panel into ChatGPT's Explore page so that users browsing OpenAI's official GPT picker also see third-party GPTs indexed by gpts.works alongside the official featured ones. This was its main selling point in late 2023, when the official GPT Store had not yet launched. After January 2024, when OpenAI shipped its own store, the extension shifted into a sidebar companion role.
The GPTs Works Custom GPT is the project's most visible artifact inside ChatGPT itself. It is a GPT-4 based Custom GPT, available at the OpenAI URL https://chat.openai.com/g/g-EBKM6RsBl-gpts-works, that wraps a small system prompt around the gpts.works search API.
The published system prompt is short and task-specific:
The GPT, named 'GPTs Works', is used for searching GPTs in third-party GPTs store via api calling. When user chat for searching GPTs with a certain question, request Actions api with user's question. If api response succeeded, response json contains a field named "data" with GPTs list in it, you should response to user with a list items, each item contains GPTs's name, description, author_name, and link (visit_url in href). If api response failed or with empty "data", you should response to user with message "No GPTs found for your purpose, please search more at https://gpts.works".
The prompt is deliberately narrow. It tells the underlying model to act as a thin router between the user and the SearchGPTs Action, not as a general conversational assistant. Most of the work happens inside the Action, not inside the model.
The Custom GPT ships with four sample conversation starters, included to help new users understand what to ask:
These map cleanly onto the index's categories: programming, image and design tools, shopping, and travel.
The Action is registered with the operation ID api_gpts_works__jit_plugin.SearchGPTs. Its OpenAPI 3.1 schema points at the https://api.gpts.works/v1 server, exposes the /gpts/search POST endpoint, and uses a bearer-token API key. The knowledge files attached to the Custom GPT are limited to a single logo image and the privacy policy URL at https://gpts.works/privacy. The bulk of the answer content lives in the database behind the Action, not in the GPT's own knowledge corpus, which keeps the Custom GPT lightweight and lets it stay current as new GPTs are indexed.
The Custom GPT inherits the standard set of capabilities available to ChatGPT Plus users at launch:
| Capability | Enabled |
|---|---|
| Web browsing | Yes |
| DALL-E image generation | Yes |
| Code interpreter | Yes |
| Knowledge files | Yes (logo image only) |
| GPT Actions | Yes (SearchGPTs) |
| Memory | Inherits the ChatGPT default |
In practice the system prompt steers the GPT toward the SearchGPTs Action for almost every user question. Web browsing, DALL-E, and the code interpreter are present mostly because they are switched on by default for new GPTs, not because the directory needs them.
The website and the API layer add a few capabilities that the Custom GPT alone does not expose:
GPTs Works got an early boost in the first week after DevDay because there were few other places to find Custom GPTs in November 2023. In a Chinese-language retrospective on his personal blog, idoubi wrote that the project went viral in its first week overseas. The GitHub repository for gpts-works accumulated more than 1,600 stars and around 340 forks, with most of that growth concentrated in late 2023 and early 2024.
The Custom GPT page lists around 6,000 chats by January 24, 2024, the snapshot date in its OpenAI listing. That number is modest compared to top GPTs in the official store but high for a niche utility GPT whose only purpose is to find other GPTs.
Once OpenAI's official GPT Store launched in January 2024 and started exposing its own search bar and trending lists, traffic to third-party directories like GPTs Works softened. The competing site allgpts.co advertised a larger index (30,000-plus GPTs by mid-2024). idoubi's own attention shifted to newer projects, most notably ThinkAny, an AI search engine that he later said was generating around 590,000 monthly visits.
As of 2025, the gpts.works domain redirects to workany.ai/bot, a separate product also operated by idoubi's team (alongside ThinkAny and ShipAny). WorkAny is not a GPT directory but a cloud-hosted agent platform that supports multiple model backends including Claude, GPT, and Gemini. The GPTs Works Custom GPT is still listed inside ChatGPT, and the open-source repository remains available at github.com/all-in-aigc/gpts-works as a reference implementation for anyone building their own GPT directory.
The Chrome extension is still listed in the Chrome Web Store but has not been updated since version 1.0.3 in November 2023. GPTs Works has aged into a historical artifact of the first wave of third-party GPT tooling, and its main lasting contribution is the open-source code, which has been forked into similar directories for other model marketplaces.