The choice between using answer engines and search engines isn’t just based on the format of the output; it’s about reliability. OpenAI wants ChatGPT search to move people away from ‘Googling’ and guide them to use its new browser, Atlas, replacing Google Chrome. But can OpenAI really make that happen if it continues to depend, at least in part, on Google’s own search results to power its answers?
Industry analysis demonstrates that ChatGPT uses more than Microsoft’s Bing to supplement results. Despite having a symbiotic relationship with Bing that has been publicly known since at least 2019, OpenAI’s tool also uses information only available to Google. Earlier this year, search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist Backlinko did an experiment; they made up a word and created a webpage with surrounding content that would be convincing to an algorithm. They then gave Google’s search robots sole access, blocking Bing and any other non-Google crawler, and allowed enough time for the page to be discovered and indexed by Google. After this was complete, they asked ChatGPT what it knew about that word.
ChatGPT was able to give a clear, specific summary, using much of the same phrasing as the content on the page. This result, similar to earlier tests and Digitalis’s own findings, suggested that ChatGPT sometimes uses Google’s search index to get current information, rather than just Bing, which was initially thought to be its only source. A report from tech news outlet The Information said OpenAI had been accessing Google’s results through SerpApi, a Google scraping service. This was to improve real-time answers in areas such as news, sports, and finance. That story spread, with experts saying that ChatGPT’s answers might come from Google’s search engine in some cases. OpenAI hasn’t explained exactly where it gets its information, but the evidence is difficult to dismiss as being untrue.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has been open about its ambitions in the search space. In late 2024, it launched ChatGPT search to paid users, allowing all users access by February 2025. It presented this as a general-purpose search engine replete with citations about where it gets its answers. OpenAI has since added features to improve ChatGPT’s accuracy and moved into the monetised area of shopping, directly competing with Google, which has been dominant in this sector for years.
Relying on rivals
OpenAI’s strategy makes sense. Markets where the winner-takes-most often prompt companies to build on their rivals’ work. Netflix uses Amazon Web Services, for example, even as Prime Video competes with its product directly. Apple earns billions from Google to keep Google as the default search engine in Safari, while simultaneously creating Apple Intelligence to answer questions without needing to search online and use Google’s product. That solution uses Siri and Spotlight together to access users’ own data without sharing that information back upstream to Google, suggesting that Google is hardly a consideration in Apple’s approach.
As barriers to accessing content are placed in front of Large Language Model (LLM) companies – paywalls, blocking data scrapers, legal challenges around copyright, and more – the battle becomes how to get new and up-to-date information to answer users’ queries. To solve this, there are only a few choices: license content, crawl the web itself, or use existing search indexes. OpenAI is doing all three. It has licensing deals with media and publishing groups such as News Corp., Guardian Media Group, Future plc, and others. It operates its own web crawler. As we have established, it at least sometimes uses Google’s and Bing’s indexes. This approach helps it maximise coverage and quality in the short term, but in the long term, external reliance becomes a weak point. This raises the question: is building on Google a losing strategy if crushing the competition undermines your own product?
Google’s SEO black box
When scraping search results from Google, only the output is collected. Google doesn’t directly explain why it picked those specific URLs to show above millions of others for a search result, or even why they are relevant. Google’s algorithm is a black box that SEO practitioners have been obsessed with for years. The visible results are only the output of a vast, ever-changing infrastructure of data and testing.
When OpenAI (or any other company) takes Google’s results to inform an AI answer, it can project the appearance of knowledge, without understanding what it takes to gain that knowledge. Google’s algorithm is a mix of thousands of factors, many of which are only visible to Google itself – such as how popular a link is, if people engage with the site, the site’s quality, what the searcher is trying to find, how recent the information is, and where the search is coming from. Even those of us at Digitalis who work diligently to collect and analyse the underpinning data of search engine algorithms do not know everything that goes into it and must also rely on experience and comparison with other projects. By effectively copying Google’s homework, OpenAI can appear to be keeping up, but it has no way to refine, reassess, or audit the information to build an understanding of why sites rank.
This competition works both ways, of course. Google is now hitting back with its own ‘answer engine’ experience in the form of AI Overviews appearing directly in search results, and its newer ‘AI Mode’ tab, which provides a very ChatGPT-style service.
The battle for control
While Google has been at the forefront of search and has been the de facto arbiter of what information people can find, it has never had to work so hard or change so much to keep on top of the game. Who wins the battle for control of how people search seems to revolve around whether Google can become more like OpenAI, or whether OpenAI can successfully divest itself from its reliance on Google and other search engines.
Though time can only tell, it’s impossible to dismiss Google as an aged contender, given that most of the breakthroughs of OpenAI have been built on the back of Google research. Transformer architecture (the ‘T’ in GPT), scalable processing, and the foundational natural language processing (NLP) that lets chatbots interpret and generate human-sounding language are all sourced from Google. Until OpenAI figures out how to avoid the cycle of dependence on existing search engines’ content, it might not break free to offer a sustainable product.
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