the option that allows ChatGPT conversations to be indexed by search engines. This is to prevent users from accidentally exposing sensitive data.
This feature rollback is in response to reports that ChatGPT conversations were being discovered by search results. The option was recently extended to ChatGPT Users.
Dane Stuckey announced the change on social media as CISO of OpenAI. He called it a short-lived test to help people find useful conversations. He said
“Ultimately we think this feature introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to, so we’re removing the option,” . “We’re also working to remove indexed content from the relevant search engines. This change is rolling out to all users through tomorrow morning.”
Despite clear warnings “not to share any sensitive content,” users of ChatGPT did it anyway, compromising their own privacy. AI vendors, like the search advertising industry claim that models can do better when they have access our data and applications. Giving AI models access to your personal information increases privacy and security concerns.
This incident reminds us of how payment service Venmo used to make user transactions public by design, until legal action forced policy changesOpenAI, on the other hand, did not expose conversations by default. Users had to opt-in in order to see their conversations.
OpenAI’s option to tell search engine to index a chat interaction took the shape of a checkbox called “Make this chat discoverable” that appears in the “Share public link to chat” window that appears after clicking the share icon in the ChatGPT. Altman embraces his inner Viking and raids Europe in Norway with a 100K GPU supercluster
In the documentation, was changed to: “You can choose to share the article through the link or make it available to be indexed by search engines.”
This year, we noticed that the documentation has changed from into:”You can choose to share the article through the link or make it available to be indexed by search engines.”
It is interesting to note that the term “article,” which is normally associated with human authorship and is used to describe the combination of a user prompt and a machine response as if they were interchangeable. OpenAI did respond to a question about when this occurred
.
OpenAI appears to be working on a search scrubbing project, but it is not complete. Google Search for chatgpt.com/share with site: operator no longer returns a shared, indexed list of chats. Bing Search returned tens of thousandsresults. DuckDuckGo returned manyresults as well. Brave Search also returned many. Many of these results contained personal information.
However, the scope of the chat purge for search results is limited. OpenAI said in June 2025 that it is facing a legal demand from a New York Times Copyright Claimfor it to retain consumer ChatGPT data and API customer information indefinitely. The AI business said it is fighting this demand because it “fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments we have made to our users.” (r)
