Updated 7/31/25 4:10 PM PT: Hours after this article was published, Openai said it had removed the feature from ChatGpt, which allows users to discover public conversations in search engines. The company says this is a short-lived experiment that ultimately “introduced too many opportunities to mistakenly share things people didn’t intend.” The original story continues.
Filter search results in Google, Bing, and other search engines to filter search results to only include URLs from the domain “https://chatgpt.com/share” to find stranger conversations with chatgpt.
Sometimes, these shared conversation links are rather dull. It helps people to renovate bathrooms, understand astrophysics, and find recipe ideas.
In another case, one user asks ChatGpt to rewrite the resume for a particular recruitment application (judging from this person’s LinkedIn that they could easily find based on chat log details, they didn’t get the job). Someone else is asking a question that sounds like they’ve come out of the incel forum. Another asks the sleazy and hostile AI assistant if he can microwave a metal fork (for the record: no), but continues to ask the troll questions more and more absurdly, eventually leading him to create a guide called “Microwaves without summoning Satan: A Beginner’s Guide.”
ChatGpt does not publish these conversations by default.
The conversation will only be added at the “/share” URL if the user intentionally clicks the “Share” button in their chat and then the second “Create Link” button. The service also declares that “you name, custom instructions, and messages you add after sharing will remain private.” After clicking to create a link, users can toggle whether they can discover the link.
However, users may not expect other search engines to index shared ChatGPT links and betray their personal information (apologies to anyone discovered by LinkedIn).
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Not intentional, but this is a standard established in part by Google. When you share public links to files on Google Drive, such as documents with the “can display links” setting, Google can index them in searches. However, Google usually does not surface links to drive documents that are not published to the web. For example, if you are linked to a trusted website, your document may appear in your search.
According to ChatGpt, these chats were indexed as part of the experiment.
“ChatGpt chats are not public unless you choose to share,” an Openai spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’ve been testing ways to make it easy to share useful conversations while still controlling users. Recently, we’ve finished our experiment showing chats in search engine results if you explicitly choose to share them.”
Search engines like Google control the algorithms that determine what content gets the surface of a search term, but the search engine itself has no control over what gets the index.
“Neither Google nor other search engines have any control over which pages are published on the web,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The publishers of these pages have full control over whether they are indexed by search engines.”
Updated, 7/31/25, 5:30 PM et et with openai additional context.
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