As many of you know, OpenAI launched Search within ChatGPT last week. And as many suspected, the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI seems to still be strong, because it seems that the ChatGPT Search index comes from Bing - for now at least. That is not to say, ChatGPT Search does not rely on other partners, they do.
I mean, The Verge covered this point saying, "The search functionality was built with “a mix of search technologies,” including Microsoft’s Bing, Fry said." Plus, on the AMA with OpenAI, that I linked to last week, OpenAI's VP of Engineering confirmed that ChatGPT Search uses Bing. They wrote, "we use a set of services and Bing is an important one."
But then Ivan Hristov posted how much of ChatGPT Search Bing actually handles and it seems like much of its web index. Ivan wrote on LinkedIn, "After some testing, I found a quirk in the ChatGPT search functionality: it appears that most searches are powered by Bing’s index. I confirmed this by checking my Cloudflare/NGINX logs – despite ChatGPT having its own bots, Bing plays a significant role here."
He added "that this has some implications." "Websites that aren’t indexed by Bing (due to known bugs or penalties) won’t appear in ChatGPT’s search results."
He then shared this chart showing a site that received a penalty by Bing, the screenshot is from Bing Webmaster Tools. But he added that ChatGPT Search won't show it. He wrote, "I even triggered a Bing penalty on one of my sites a few weeks ago to see how it affected visibility, and, as expected, it disappeared from ChatGPT search results too. The website is working just perfect on Google."
Mike King replied to that post saying, "Good validation/verification here. Fabrice confirmed this at Tech SEO Connect as well." Fabrice Canel is the Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing.
So if you currently want to rank in ChatGPT Search, you need to be indexed by Microsoft Bing Search.
This does not mean the search results are the same, but rather they share the same index of web pages and documents.
Just comparing some ChatGPT Search results to Bing's search results and seeing some big inconsistencies there. Including some top ranking sources in ChatGPT Search that aren't on page one of the Bing SERPs for the query. We know Bing is an important source for ChatGPT search, but… pic.twitter.com/ytfPR63Lno
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 3, 2024
Hat tip to @ipullrank for spotting this.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
