What search engine does ChatGPT use?

ChatGPT does use Bing, as far as anyone outside OpenAI can confirm.

Microsoft is the one search company OpenAI's help page points to, and when Nick Turley, OpenAI's head of product for ChatGPT, testified in the Justice Department's case against Google on April 22, 2025, he said OpenAI was having problems with its existing search provider, which Reuters identified as Bing (PYMNTS summarized the testimony). He also said ChatGPT was years away from answering most questions with OpenAI's own search technology.

For a site owner, that makes Bing's index worth caring about again. If Bing won't index a page, one of the doors ChatGPT uses is shut, and Bing Webmaster Tools now shows when Microsoft's own AI answers cite you (here's how to read Bing's AI Performance report).

ChatGPT does not have a deal with Google, but it has reportedly used Google's results anyway.

In the same testimony, Turley said OpenAI asked Google for access to its search API in 2024 and was turned down that August. A year later, in August 2025, The Information reported, citing people with knowledge of the arrangement, that ChatGPT answered some real-time questions about news, sports and markets with Google results scraped by a company called SerpApi (Tom's Guide summarizes that report). Neither OpenAI nor Google has confirmed it on the record, so it belongs in the "reported" column, not the "established" one.

Does it matter which engine it is? Less than the debate suggests. Google and Bing don't return the same pages in the same order, but both rank on the same two things, Authority and Relevance, so a page that has earned its place on a topic doesn't vanish because the provider changed.

ChatGPT searches the web by rewriting your question into its own search queries (the fan-out), running them, reading what comes back and citing a handful of the pages.

In our study of 100 prompts across ten topics, from software and personal finance to home repair and careers, run through the ChatGPT app with search switched on, it ran 216 searches. That's 2.2 per prompt on average, with a range of 0 to 6, and not one of them was the prompt as typed.

Its searches were longer than the prompts, too (about 10 words against 8), because ChatGPT packs in exactly what it wants to find:

• a year in 39% of searches, almost always 2026 (and 2027 when the question was about next spring's cherry blossoms in Japan);
• the word "official" in 16%, to reach a company's own page;
• a site: operator in 12%, such as site:bitwarden.com plans families pricing 2026;
• price words (price, pricing, cost, cheapest) in 26%.

For each prompt its search returned about 22 results, and it cited about 4 of them. Software questions drew the most searches (3.9 per prompt) and shopping questions the fewest (1.1), because for products it tends to put every model name into one long search. The full numbers, including how Claude and Gemini searched the same 100 prompts, are in our fan-out queries study.

ChatGPT is not a search engine in the sense Google is, because you don't search its index; it's a language model that runs searches against indexes and writes an answer from what it reads.

OpenAI does crawl the web with OAI-SearchBot to build its own index for ChatGPT search, but by Turley's account in 2025 that index was years from answering most questions on its own.

That is why I keep calling AI search SEO with a new front end. The answer is generated, but the sources are retrieved, and retrieval is ranking.

To show up in ChatGPT search, a page has to clear three gates: the crawler has to be allowed to read it, the page has to be in the indexes ChatGPT searches, and it has to rank for the searches ChatGPT actually runs, which are rarely the words your customer typed.

1. Let OAI-SearchBot in. It's the crawler behind ChatGPT search, and it's separate from GPTBot (the training crawler), so blocking GPTBot doesn't take you out of search but blocking OAI-SearchBot does. The full comparison is in OAI-SearchBot vs GPTBot vs ChatGPT-User.
2. Get indexed in Bing as well as Google. Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and look at which pages Bing refuses to index. In my experience that's usually an Authority problem, not a technical one.
3. Rank for the fan-out, not the prompt. List the searches ChatGPT runs for your money prompts and make sure one of your pages answers each by name, in its title, H1 and slug.
4. Be on the shortlist before the search starts. More on that below, because it's the step most people never think about.

To check if ChatGPT can find your page, test each gate separately, because a failure at any one of them looks identical from the outside: you're simply not cited.

Our free AI visibility checker covers the first two for ChatGPT. It reads your robots.txt the way OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User would, sends real requests with their user agents from our server (which catches a firewall blocking a bot that robots.txt allows), and asks ChatGPT about your topic to see whether your page comes back in its search results or its citations.

If ChatGPT can fetch the page and still doesn't use it, the third gate is the problem. Run the prompt through our query fan-out tool to see the searches ChatGPT ran and where your site sits in Google's top 10 for each one.

What most people overlook about ChatGPT search is that the shortlist is often decided before the search runs.

We gave it 24 prompts that asked for a product or service without naming one ("best CRM for a 10-person sales team", "best password manager for families", "best laptop for college students" and so on), and in 21 of the 24 its searches already named specific brands. For the CRM question, its first search was "best CRM for small sales team 10 users HubSpot Pipedrive Zoho Salesforce pricing features 2026", then it ran an official-pricing search for each of those four, and the only sites it cited were the four vendors' own. Claude, given the same 24 prompts, never put a brand name in a search; it searched the plain question every time.

We asked four of those prompts three times each. The wording of ChatGPT's searches changed on every run, but 14 of the 18 brands and products it named came back in all three runs. So the names come from the model, before any search, and the search mostly confirms prices and details on official pages. If you sell CRM software and you're not on that list, ranking for "best CRM" may never come into play, because ChatGPT didn't search for "best CRM". It searched for HubSpot.

How do you get on the list? The same way you get on any shortlist: be the brand the web already writes about, links to and reviews, so you're in what the model learned and in what its searches return. That's Authority, and it's why GEO is still SEO.

These are the ChatGPT search engine questions that come up after the one above.

Does ChatGPT have its own search index?

ChatGPT has its own search index in the sense that OpenAI crawls the web with OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, but it also sends queries to outside providers, and in April 2025 its head of product testified that its own search was still years from handling most questions alone.

Is ChatGPT linked to Google?

ChatGPT is not officially linked to Google: Google turned down OpenAI's 2024 request for search API access, according to testimony in the 2025 antitrust trial. The reported use of Google results through SerpApi, published in August 2025, hasn't been confirmed by either company.

Do I need to be indexed in Bing to show up in ChatGPT?

Being indexed in Bing isn't a stated requirement for ChatGPT, but Microsoft is the one search partner OpenAI points to, so a page Bing won't index has one less way in. Check Bing's index alongside OAI-SearchBot access, and remember that OpenAI's crawler documentation says blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps you out of ChatGPT's search answers whatever Bing holds.

How many searches does ChatGPT run per question?

ChatGPT ran 2.2 searches per question on average in our 100-prompt test, from 0 to 6. Comparison and software questions pushed it higher, and simple how-to questions often got one search or none.

Why does ChatGPT add the year to its searches?

ChatGPT adds the year to its searches to reach current pages, and it did so in 39% of searches in our test, almost always with the current year. If your page answers a question where the date matters (prices, rates, "best of" lists), keep it current and say so on the page.

Does ChatGPT use Google Search Console data?

ChatGPT doesn't use Google Search Console data; Search Console is Google's report on how Google sees your site. ChatGPT's activity shows up in your server logs as OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User visits and in your analytics as referrals tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com, which OpenAI's publisher FAQ says ChatGPT adds to every referral link (the links it cited in our study carried it). Bing's AI Performance report covers Microsoft's own AI answers, with no sign that it includes ChatGPT.