Your public ChatGPT queries are getting indexed by Google and other search engines
San Francisco, CA – A recent discovery sent ripples through the AI community, revealing that publicly shared conversations from OpenAI’s ChatGPT were being indexed by major search engines, including Google and Bing. This posed a significant privacy concern, as detailed user interactions, intended simply as sharable links, became openly discoverable, potentially exposing personal information.
Swiftly responding to the growing privacy alarm, OpenAI announced on July 31, 2025, that it had removed the feature enabling these public conversations to be indexed by search engines. An OpenAI spokesperson later clarified that this capability was part of a “short-lived experiment” which, in retrospect, “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.”
The revelation offered an intriguing, sometimes unsettling, glimpse into the vast range of human inquiries. Researchers found that by filtering search results to include only URLs from the domain “https://chatgpt.com/share,” a wide array of user dialogues with ChatGPT became accessible. While many conversations were innocuous—ranging from help with bathroom renovations and understanding astrophysics to simply finding recipe ideas—others proved more sensitive.
Some exposed chats contained enough detail to potentially betray personal information, such as a user’s resume content leading directly to their LinkedIn profile. Other unearthed dialogues veered into more peculiar territory, including questions echoing concerning online forums, or even persistent, trollish queries like whether one could microwave a metal fork, which bizarrely culminated in an AI-generated guide titled “How to Use a Microwave Without Summoning Satan.”
It’s important to understand that ChatGPT conversations are not made public by default. For a chat to become a “/share” URL, users had to deliberately click a “share” button within their conversation and then a subsequent “create link” button. Furthermore, an option to toggle search engine discoverability was present. However, the critical oversight was that users might not have anticipated the actual indexing of these links by external search engines, leading to unintended public exposure.
An OpenAI spokesperson had previously stated, “ChatGPT chats are not public unless you choose to share them. We’ve been testing ways to make it easier to share helpful conversations, while keeping users in control, and we recently ended an experiment to have chats appear in search engine results if you explicitly opted in when sharing.” This statement confirms the experimental nature of the feature and underscores the company’s intention for user control, even if the outcome diverged.
Google weighed in on the matter, emphasizing the distinction between indexing and control. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch, “Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web. Publishers of these pages have full control over whether they are indexed by search engines.” This aligns with Google’s general policy of indexing public web content, similar to how publicly accessible Google Drive documents can appear in search results if linked from other public web pages.
This incident serves as a crucial reminder of the evolving landscape of digital privacy, particularly as AI tools become more integrated into our daily lives. OpenAI’s swift action to remove the feature highlights the paramount importance of user control and data protection in fostering trust within the rapidly advancing realm of artificial intelligence.
