According to The Information, OpenAI has been using data scraped from Google Search via SerpApi, a web-scraping service based in Austin, Texas. This data reportedly helps ChatGPT answer real-time queries about news, sports, and financial markets; all areas where OpenAI's in-house tools are still playing catch-up.

OpenAI is seemingly also solely responsible for removing the chats, perhaps most quickly by using a tool that Google provides to block pages from appearing in search results. But that tool does not stop pages from being indexed by other search engines, so it's possible chats will disappear sooner in Google results than 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.