ChatGPT uses Google Search while aiming to dethrone it: Report

Google’s dominance in search has been under pressure since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. Concerns that AI could disrupt Google’s search business grew stronger when ChatGPT introduced search features last year, competing with rivals like Microsoft Bing and Perplexity.

In a recent interview with The Verge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted he no longer relies on Google Search:

“I legitimately cannot tell you the last time I did a Google search.”

However, according to a report by The Information, OpenAI has been leveraging data scraped from Google Search to boost ChatGPT’s real-time answers in areas such as news, sports, and financial markets, where its AI models fall short.

The company reportedly uses SerpApi, a paid web-scraping service that extracts live search engine results. Notably, SerpApi’s client list includes Meta, Apple, and Perplexity, and OpenAI was previously listed on its website before being removed.

Earlier, former Google engineer Abhishek Iyer demonstrated how ChatGPT accessed dummy web pages indexed only on Google, further proving its reliance on Google Search.

Google Rejected OpenAI’s Request

Officially, OpenAI maintains that ChatGPT’s search is powered by its own web crawler, along with data from Bing and licensed partnerships with publishers. Yet, during Google’s antitrust trial, OpenAI executive Nick Turley admitted that the company requested access to Google’s search index but was denied.

Turley also highlighted quality concerns with Bing’s results, calling them “at best a near-term solution,” while acknowledging that access to Google’s data would significantly improve OpenAI’s own index.