Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, concerns have grown about how AI could disrupt Google’s long-standing search dominance. Those fears intensified last year when OpenAI introduced search capabilities within ChatGPT, rivaling Microsoft’s Bing and Perplexity. The chatbot’s accuracy is praised so much that CEO Sam Altman himself claims he no longer uses Google Search.
Scraping Google Through SerpApi
However, a recent report by The Information revealed that OpenAI has allegedly been relying on Google Search data to enhance ChatGPT’s responses. Instead of building everything from scratch, OpenAI reportedly taps into SerpApi, a paid web-scraping service that extracts real-time search results. Interestingly, SerpApi also lists Meta, Apple, and Perplexity as clients. Notably, OpenAI’s name has now been removed from SerpApi’s website.
Experiments That Exposed The Practice
Before the latest revelations, Abhishek Iyer, a former Google engineer, had already shown evidence that ChatGPT indirectly uses Google. He created dummy web pages indexed only by Google, which ChatGPT was later able to fetch information from. This suggested that the chatbot wasn’t fully independent in handling real-time queries.
Google’s Refusal and Quality Concerns With Bing
OpenAI had earlier acknowledged that it uses its own web crawler, Bing, and publisher partnerships for search. But during Google’s anti-trust trial last year, ChatGPT’s search head Nick Turley admitted the company requested Google’s index—only to be denied. Turley also confessed that Bing’s results often suffered from “significant quality issues,” making them a short-term fix at best.
What It Means For The AI vs. Search Battle
The revelations highlight the massive challenge of building a reliable search index from scratch. While AI-driven chatbots like ChatGPT are emerging as alternatives to traditional search, their reliance on existing players like Google underlines how difficult it is to replicate decades of web indexing expertise. For now, ChatGPT’s strength lies in user-friendly answers—but it may still depend on Google’s backbone.
