Sometimes, these shared conversation links are pretty dull — people ask for help renovating their bathroom, understanding astrophysics, and finding recipe ideas.

In another case, one user asks ChatGPT to rewrite their resume for a particular job application (judging by this person’s LinkedIn, which was easy to find based on the details in the chat log, they did not get the job). Someone else is asking questions that sound like they came out of an incel forum. Another person asks the snarky, hostile AI assistant if they can microwave a metal fork (for the record: no), but they continue to ask the AI increasingly absurd and trollish questions, eventually leading it to create a guide called “How to Use a Microwave Without Summoning Satan: A Beginner’s Guide.”

ChatGPT does not make these conversations public by default.

A conversation would be appended with a “/share” URL only if the user deliberately clicks the “share” button on their own chat and then clicks a second “create link” button. The service also declares that “your name, custom instructions, and any messages you add after sharing stay private.” After clicking through to create a link, users can toggle whether or not they want that link to be discoverable.

However, users may not anticipate that other search engines will index their shared ChatGPT links, potentially betraying personal information (my apologies to the person whose LinkedIn I discovered).

Though unintentional, this is a norm that was established in part by Google. When people share public links to files from Google Drive, such as documents with the “Anyone with link can view” setting, Google may index them in Search. However, Google generally does not surface links to Drive documents that have not been publicly posted on the web — for example, a document may appear in search if it is linked on a trusted website.

According to ChatGPT, these chats were indexed as part of an experiment.

“ChatGPT chats are not public unless you choose to share them,” an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’ve been testing ways to make it easier to share helpful conversations, while keeping users in control, and we recently ended an experiment to have chats appear in search engine results if you explicitly opted in when sharing.”

While search engines like Google control the algorithms that determine what content gets surface for search terms, the search engines themselves cannot control what gets indexed.

“Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Publishers of these pages have full control over whether they are indexed by search engines.”