ChatGPT Pulse doesn't exist anymore, and two guides from this summer still don't know

What ChatGPT Pulse actually was

OpenAI launched Pulse on 25 September 2025 as a new tab inside the ChatGPT app, available only to $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscribers on mobile at first. Each night, Pulse would research topics drawn from your chat history, saved memory, explicit feedback, and, if you opted in, connected Gmail and Calendar, then present five to ten visual "cards" the next morning: a personalized digest instead of something you had to ask for. Users could steer future editions with a "Curate" control and tell it directly what to research. OpenAI's stated plan at the time was to expand access beyond Pro "with the goal of making it available to everyone."

The retirement: 17 June 2026

That expansion never happened. Instead, per contemporaneous reporting from 9to5Mac and corroborated independently by Digit.in and several other outlets, OpenAI announced on 17 June 2026 that Pulse was being retired, with existing Pro users getting a 14-day access window before it disappeared entirely. In its place, OpenAI shipped Scheduled Tasks, a system for setting explicit reminders and recurring web-monitoring jobs, released to Go, Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans on both web and mobile, ironically the broad, cross-tier rollout Pulse itself was promised but never got. OpenAI's framing, per Digit.in's reporting, was consolidation rather than failure: proactive features work best when they're "personalised, action-oriented, and steerable by the user," and the engagement patterns OpenAI saw inside Pulse's tasks specifically were folded into the new system.

What replaced it, and how to rebuild a "Pulse" yourself

Scheduled Tasks is a different mental model, not a rebrand. Pulse was autonomous and adaptive: it decided what to surface based on inferred interest. Scheduled Tasks is explicit and precise: you tell ChatGPT what to check and when, and it runs only that. A Scheduled page in the sidebar lists every active task, its next run time, and controls to pause, resume, edit, or delete it; you can pin an exact time or leave it to a broader window like "morning" or "evening." To approximate what Pulse used to do automatically, OpenAI's own guidance is to ask ChatGPT directly to schedule a daily briefing based on your interests and past chats, essentially rebuilding Pulse's behavior as one explicit task instead of getting it by default.

1. Open ChatGPT and start a new chat (or find the Scheduled page directly in the sidebar, if your app version shows it).
2. Type a specific instruction rather than a vague one: "Every weekday at 7am, check for news on [your topic] and summarize anything significant" works better than "give me a daily brief," since Scheduled Tasks doesn't infer intent the way Pulse tried to.
3. Confirm the task when ChatGPT proposes a schedule, or adjust the time window if the default doesn't fit.
4. Check the Scheduled page after the first run or two and edit the wording if the results are too broad or too narrow, the same tuning effort Pulse users reported needing.
5. Delete or pause the task from the same page if it stops being useful, rather than letting it run indefinitely.

One practical gap worth knowing about before you rebuild your routine: Scheduled Tasks only checks what you explicitly ask it to check. Pulse's underlying advantage, whatever its flaws, was noticing things you hadn't thought to ask about by mining your broader chat history and memory. Recreating that fully means setting up several distinct tasks rather than one, since a single scheduled prompt won't independently discover new topics the way Pulse's nightly research pass did.

What using Pulse was actually like

Real user feedback from while Pulse was still live, drawn from OpenAI's own community forum in January 2026, is worth reading before you decide whether to miss it. One user, posting as EricGT, found real value in Pulse surfacing research, GitHub activity, and industry news aligned to his interests, but reported it took genuine prompt-engineering effort to tune well, and repeatedly ran into broken links in its "fresh research roundup" cards, GitHub and arXiv links that simply 404'd. He also flagged a specific benchmark citation, referred to as "Prompt-to-Patch," as possibly fabricated, since its stated title didn't match the source it claimed to summarize. Other users wanted finer-grained, per-item feedback controls that never shipped, found daily update cards for ongoing events like CES became repetitive, and, notably, one user pointed out that Pulse was excluded from Business plans entirely, despite Business costing more per seat than Plus.

Two guides published this year still describe a feature that's gone

Search "chatgpt pulse" today and two of the most recently dated results are already wrong. One, published 1 September 2026, describes Pulse as "launched as a preview for Pro users on mobile, with a stated plan to widen access" and frames Scheduled Tasks as a separate, parallel tool rather than Pulse's replacement, with no mention that Pulse had been shut down two and a half months earlier. Another, updated 18 August 2026, states Pulse is "currently only available to Pro users on mobile" and anticipates a broader rollout that, by that date, had already been cancelled in favor of retirement. Both articles carry recent-looking dates while describing a product state from before June. If you're comparing sources on this topic, a recent publish date alone doesn't guarantee the content was actually refreshed.

The category didn't die, it moved to Google

Pulse's core idea, an AI that checks your email and calendar and hands you a proactive morning summary, didn't disappear from the market when OpenAI killed its own version. Google introduced a close analog, Gemini Daily Brief, at I/O 2026, initially gated to paid Plus/Pro/Ultra subscribers and built on "Personal Intelligence" scanning Gmail, Calendar, Tasks, and past Gemini chats into "Top of mind," "FYI," and "Looking ahead" sections. On 4 September 2026, less than three months after Pulse's shutdown, Google dropped the subscription requirement entirely for US personal accounts, making the feature category Pulse pioneered free at Google while OpenAI's own version no longer exists at any price.

Proactive AI briefing features, September 2026
------------------------------------------------------------------
ChatGPT Pulse        RETIRED 17 Jun 2026 -> replaced by Scheduled Tasks
ChatGPT Scheduled    LIVE, user-configured, Go/Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise
Gemini Daily Brief   LIVE, free for eligible US personal accounts since 4 Sep 2026

If your research workflow runs through Gemini Notebook rather than the general Gemini app, note that Notebook's own automatic summarization (its Notebook Guide feature) is a different kind of tool: it's source-grounded and reactive to material you've uploaded, not a cross-app autonomous daily brief. It's a supplement to Notebook's research function, not a Pulse or Daily Brief competitor, and comparing the two directly would be comparing different jobs. If you're specifically trying to build a study routine rather than a news brief, our ChatGPT Study Mode guide covers a more directly comparable feature.

Privacy considerations that outlive Pulse

Pulse's original launch drew scrutiny for its Gmail and Calendar access, deep personal-data integrations that predate Pulse itself, since they're part of ChatGPT's general connector infrastructure rather than something built specifically for Pulse. In September 2025, days before Pulse shipped, security researcher Eito Miyamura demonstrated that a booby-trapped Google Calendar invite could prompt-inject ChatGPT into searching a connected Gmail account and exfiltrating sensitive details once a user asked ChatGPT to act on that calendar event. That vulnerability targeted the underlying Gmail/Calendar connectors, not Pulse's research pipeline specifically, but Scheduled Tasks relies on the same category of connector access today. If you're setting up a recurring task that touches Gmail or Calendar, it's worth treating calendar invites from unknown senders with the same suspicion you'd apply to an email attachment, since a connected AI agent inherits whatever a malicious invite can put in front of it.

What happened to your old Pulse data

If you used Pulse before the shutdown, its cards and the specific research it generated are gone along with the feature itself; there's no export or archive OpenAI has publicized for past Pulse briefs. Your underlying chat history and memory, the raw material Pulse read from, weren't deleted, since those are stored independently of Pulse and still feed ChatGPT's general behavior and any Scheduled Tasks you set up now. If you'd connected Gmail or Calendar specifically for Pulse and no longer want ChatGPT to have that access, check your connected-apps settings directly rather than assume losing the Pulse tab also revoked the underlying connector permission; connector access and individual feature access aren't guaranteed to be the same toggle.

People also ask

Is ChatGPT Pulse still available?

No. OpenAI retired ChatGPT Pulse on 17 June 2026, with existing Pro subscribers given a 14-day window before access ended entirely. It has been replaced by Scheduled Tasks.

What replaced ChatGPT Pulse?

Scheduled Tasks, a user-configured system for recurring reminders and web-monitoring jobs, available on ChatGPT Go, Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. Unlike Pulse's automatic overnight feed, Scheduled Tasks only runs what you explicitly set up.

How do I get a daily briefing like ChatGPT Pulse used to provide?

Ask ChatGPT directly to schedule a recurring daily briefing based on your interests and past chats. This creates an explicit Scheduled Task that approximates what Pulse did automatically, rather than a feature you toggle on.

Why was ChatGPT Pulse discontinued?

OpenAI's stated reasoning, per its own announcement, was that proactive AI works best when it's personalized, action-oriented, and directly steerable by the user, and that the useful engagement patterns from Pulse were consolidated into Scheduled Tasks. OpenAI did not describe it as a failure.

Is there a free alternative to ChatGPT Pulse?

Google's Gemini Daily Brief, a similar proactive morning-summary feature built on Gmail, Calendar, and past chat history, became free for eligible US personal Google accounts on 4 September 2026, without requiring a paid Google AI subscription.