Your Public ChatGPT Queries Were (Briefly) Discoverable via Google—Here’s What Went Wrong
What Happened? On July 31, 2025, TechCrunch reported a troubling development: public shared ChatGPT conversations were discoverable through search engines like Google and Bing when indexed from https://chatgpt.com/share links. These conversations had only been made public if users explicitly clicked "Share link" and opted in by enabling a "make this chat discoverable" setting. However, search engines crawled those pages anyway, exposing queries ranging from innocuous recipe ideas to deeply personal job applications and even disturbing content. Why Privacy Took a Hit Search engines index anything publicly posted online. If a page lacks noindex tags or blocking rules, Google & Bing can crawl and cache it-whether or not that was intended. Users may have unknowingly checked the discoverability option, trusting the tool but overlooking downstream exposure risks. OpenAI's Response By August 1, 2025, OpenAI disabled the feature entirely, rolling back the "make discoverable" option. According to Chief Information Security Officer Dane…
