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Your public ChatGPT queries are getting indexed by Google and other search engines

It’s a strange glimpse into the human mind: if you filter search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines to only include URLs from the domain “https://chatgpt.com/share,” you can find strangers’ conversations with ChatGPT.

Sometimes, these shared conversation links are pretty dull — people ask for help renovating their bathroom, understanding astrophysics, and finding recipe ideas.

In another case, one user asks ChatGPT to rewrite their resume for a particular job application (judging by this person’s LinkedIn, which was easy to find based on the details in the chat log, they did not get the job). Someone else is asking questions that sound like they came out of an incel forum. Another person asks the snarky, hostile AI assistant if they can microwave a metal fork (for the record: no), but they continue to ask the AI increasingly absurd and trollish questions, eventually leading it to create a guide called “How to Use a Microwave Without Summoning Satan: A Beginner’s Guide.”

ChatGPT does not make these conversations public by default.

A conversation would be appended with a “/share” URL only if the user deliberately clicks the “share” button on their own chat and then clicks a second “create link” button. The service also declares that “your name, custom instructions, and any messages you add after sharing stay private.”

However, users probably do not anticipate that Google will index their shared ChatGPT links, potentially betraying personal information (my apologies to the person whose LinkedIn I discovered).

Though unintentional, this is a norm that was established in part by Google. When people share public links to files from Google Drive, such as documents with the “Anyone with link can view” setting, Google may index them in Search. However, Google generally does not surface links to Drive documents that have not been publicly posted on the web — for example, a document may appear in search if it is linked on a trusted website.

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But this doesn’t seem to be the case for these ChatGPT logs. OpenAI did not provide comment before publication.

“Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Publishers of these pages have full control over whether they are indexed by search engines.”