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ChatGPT chats were indexed then removed from search but still remain online
- Sweepi 1y agoNot that I dislike criticizing OpenAI, but this seems to be a case of "your users are way dummer than you thought". Like the button says "allow it to be shown in web searches". How can you misunderstand this?
- simonw 1y agoHere's the copy they used on that checkbox: Make this chat discoverable Allows it to be shown in web searches "Discoverable" is insider jargon. What does "web search" mean? Is that about whether I should be able to search for my chats in the app in the future? That language may seem obvious to those of us with a deep level of technical literacy - the denizens of Hacker News for example - but ChatGPT has over a billion users now. Try asking the less technical people in your life to describe the difference between a web site and an app, or what a URL is, or get them to describe what "web search" means and name some products in that category. You may be unpleasantly surprised. Meta AI gave people a "share" option with several levels of click though required to share a post and it was a fiasco: https://futurism.com/meta-ai-embarassing https://futurism.com/meta-ai-embarassing
- AlienRobot 1y agoIs there a legal reason for not writing "Let other people see your chats when searching on Google"
- ronsor 1y agoThis is somewhat true, but we can't redefine every phrase from first principles whenever we use it. Web search has been a thing for decades now. People will simply have to learn things; we can't cater to an indefinite amount of ignorance.
- jadamson 1y agoThe word "public" is already used for this just about everywhere else.
- saurik 1y agoFWIW, if it is "public", I'd think it would merely be something anyone could access if they already knew where it was, a concept that people experience often with "public" share URLs from numerous services; being "discoverable" is much stronger, as it tells us that random people are going to be able to search and, well, discover it.
- ronsor 1y agoI mean, this isn't consistent with the usual definition of public, especially on sites that let you share content: * YouTube uses "public" for viewable by everyone and discoverable; for something that should only be accessible if the URL is shared, then YouTube uses the term "unlisted" * Facebook uses "public" similarly More generally, "to publish" (related to the adjective "public") means to make something generally known, as opposed to simply sharing with a closed group (even if they can share it too).
- saurik 1y agoOK, touche: I agree I'm wrong.
- aniviacat 1y agoI'd like to add that the web search button in the ChatGPT interface is labled "Web search". And even when it starts searching on its own, it displays "searching the web...".
- simonw 1y agoWhen you have a billion users I would argue that you do need to cater to an indefinite amount of ignorance, where "ignorance" here means wildly varying levels of technical experience.
- babyshake 1y agoIs the only/main use-case for this being that you are trying to do some type of SEO or marketing? Why else would you intentionally want your chats to shown in web searches? It does seem like this UI should be updated with an extra confirmation step warning you that your chat will be public and this should be thought of as a permanent decision as anything made public on the web long enough to be indexed is public forever.
- Kim_Bruning 1y agoIf you publish something on the web, the traditional expectation is that it shows up in web searches.
- hayleox 1y ago"Discoverable", I agree with you on; that should have been "public". And there probably should have been an "are you sure?" pop-up the first time you do this, explaining in a little bit more depth. But "web searches" seems like a pretty straightforward term. Even if you think it means ChatGPT's built-in search, that would still imply that other ChatGPT users could find it. "Allow", I feel, is a pretty strong word that implies someone else is getting access (because why would I need to give myself permission for something?).
- justinsaccount 1y agoIt says public. twice.
- simonw 1y agoHere's the full text from that dialog: Public link created A public link to your chat has been created. Manage previously shared chats at any time via Settings. [ ] Make this chat discoverable Allows it to be shown in web searches https://chatgpt.com/share/ [ Copy link ] The use of the word "public" here is completely separate from the checkbox about making it discoverable. The whole point of this feature is to provide you with a URL you can share with someone to let you see the conversation. The issue of whether or not that should be included in public search indexes is incredibly technically dense. You have to understand what a search engine is, and that content can be deliberately excluded from search. If you know what a robots.txt file is that's easy, but most people have zero understanding of how search engines actually work.
- Kim_Bruning 1y agoI suppose you have a point? Though this seems like a bit of a problem now that it's 2025. Seems like (it should be) basic civic knowledge that things you publish in public can be read by everyone. These days, publishing to web is the biggest "in public of all"... you can get potentially get more eyeballs than the front page of the New York Times, or if you put it up in lights on times square. Despite not being the biggest fan, I'm not sure that this is an OpenAI problem per-se. They offer the option of sharing your stuff in public, people use the option. The consequences should be common sense. You'd hope, at least.
- DonHopkins 1y ago"Make this chat discoverable" Much worse: "Discoverable" is legal jargon too. As if it wasn't already legally discoverable in a lawsuit. They're implicitly promising that you have some kind of client-llm privacy privilege if you don't check that.
- johnfn 1y agoThis is after a user has clicked "Share", read a modal that says "This chat may contain private information" and then clicked "Create link".
- grodriguez100 1y agoI don’t think “web searches” requires “a deep level of technical literacy”…
- knowsuchagency 1y agoSuggested alternative: “Public see chat. Public find chat. No privacy. All will see!”
- deepsun 1y agoI agree in particular, but disagree in general. I prefer to live in the world when everything assumes people are just a little less ignorant than they really are. Kind of "aim higher". Otherwise everything becomes "aim lower", and we cannot have nice things. I particular I agree OpenAI should have a better UX, but also I want to expect people to actually learn what a "URL" is if we want to live in the future. They might just go and learn.
- karmakaze 1y agoWhy are we 'lawyering' this instead of saying how they could/should improve it? All it needs is a small affordance: hover to get a clearer, longer description or something to that effect.
- simonw 1y agoI think ditching the feature was the right move for them. I'm not sure you could fix this with copy - we all know that users don't read anything. The audience of people who genuinely do want their shared chats to also be indexed by Google is likely absolutely tiny. The audience of people who find such an option confusing and are likely to turn it on without understanding the consequences is proven to be pretty huge already.
- simonw 1y agoI expanded on this on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/3/privacy-design/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/3/privacy-design/
- a2128 1y agoThis is where genericide would be less confusing. "Show in google searches", gets the point across in 4 unambiguous words
- sunaookami 1y agoAnd what about other search engines? ;)
- ronsor 1y agoThe number one rule of software is that no matter how clear you make something, users will still screw up and blame you. Then other similarly ignorant people will agree with them.
- aresant 1y ago"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." UX 101 taught by George Carlin
- j45 1y agoNot sure why the links wouldn't be 404ing?
- thephyber 1y agoWhy would they? This article applies to the subset of ChatGPT chats which were shared and opted into to make them visible to web crawlers. 404ing these chats would break the feature. The problem is simply accurately messaging to the user who is opting to share it.
- easton 1y agoFeels like they could just change the URL to the chat when you disable the discoverable thing. Guess that’d break links you explicitly shared, but who’s going and referencing someone else’s ChatGPT search so often they can’t take a updated link?
- j45 1y agoWhen you turn off the sharing, the links should dissapear. At least this is how sharing features seem to work in SaaS. Feels like a possible bug.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- simple10 1y agoDuckDuckGo still has a lot of the share links indexed. The file upload ones are particularly interesting. Lots of financial and market analysis stuff like this one: https://chatgpt.com/share/68805b2d-0bf0-8007-b325-b06160356c70 https://chatgpt.com/share/68805b2d-0bf0-8007-b325-b06160356c... (no PII in the chat) Looks like Google and Archive.org removed the share URLs.
- _def 1y ago"inurl:https://chatgpt.com/share/ https://chatgpt.com/share/" does not find any links on duckduckgo for me
- afro88 1y agoThe filter is actually "site:", but yes, no links indexed on DDG
- simple10 1y agoReally? I'm still seeing results on DDG. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fchatgpt.com%2Fshare%2F+upload https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fchatgpt.com%2... Maybe it's a region or cache issue while DDG is actively remove them? Some random shares: - https://chatgpt.com/share/67d0b32e-3ff0-800a-b1a9-b4a32e1ab937 https://chatgpt.com/share/67d0b32e-3ff0-800a-b1a9-b4a32e1ab9... (essay) - https://chatgpt.com/share/67712739-53ac-8012-a151-d2dddcc40f0b https://chatgpt.com/share/67712739-53ac-8012-a151-d2dddcc40f... (dad jokes with math) - https://chatgpt.com/share/678f887f-03f0-800d-ae17-a550ec758fec https://chatgpt.com/share/678f887f-03f0-800d-ae17-a550ec758f... (health) The ones above don't have PII, but I was also finding job application shares that had full CV PII. Yikes!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 1y agoYet another example of why you should assume that anything you type into a web form will become public either deliberately or accidentally.
- fardo 1y agoThis feels like it should be a non-controversy. Even being uncharitable, a big off-by-default checkbox saying “make this discoverable in web searches” is roughly as explicit as you can possibly make this feature textually, assuming your users will be applying any reading comprehension. If they’re not, no further warnings were going to save them, so short of removing the feature or gating it behind increasingly elaborate “if only you knew better!” emails or pop-up modals they also presumably would not be reading, this was the likely outcome. At some point, I don’t feel bad saying this is a user-side PEBKAC, and that more alerting would be a waste of time.
- _cs2017_ 1y agoThe article says that after the fix, the "discoverable" option sets nofollow/noindex. If so, how are discoverable chats different from non-discoverable now?
- _gmkt 1y agoWhat does this have to do with AI? If you're an idiot who can't read and doesn't understand that a shared chat will be publicly accessible, then nothing is going to help you.
- busymom0 1y agoI think this is more of a UI/UX issue than AI issue.
- quitit 1y agoBasically nothing: The angle being taken here seems to be that private or secret information was leaking out onto the web like a security flaw. However that's clearly not the case as the user was already making the active choice of sharing those secrets or private information with another person. A person who: could copy or screenshot the information, or provide the link to another. So the situation at hand is that the user was already willing to take on some risk to divulge that information. This weighs against the arguments that "it's bad UX" and "maybe they don't understand what discoverable or web search means". - Both of which were already flimsy since "Discoverable" is basic comprehension, and we passed the bar for "web search" by knowing what ChatGPT is and how to use it. There is a line where we need to allow the individual the freedom to have agency over their actions and the responsibility of the consequences of those actions.
- simple10 1y agoThis is a pretty huge PII leak. I was able to find a bunch of job application shares that had uploaded CVs with full PII. Names, phone #s, address etc. Yikes!
- simple10 1y agoFor non-PII shares, here's one that feels tailor made for HN. Dad jokes with math: https://chatgpt.com/share/67712739-53ac-8012-a151-d2dddcc40f0b https://chatgpt.com/share/67712739-53ac-8012-a151-d2dddcc40f...
- iJohnDoe 1y agoInternet Archive didn’t need to archive them. They could do the right thing and remove the data. Maybe they have now based on some of the comments.