In a dramatic turn of events concerning the SEO and AI world, some recent tests are indicating that ChatGPT is borrowing information found in the Google search snippets when nothing is found on Bing. Although ChatGPT has officially been using web search through Bing, when a critical study by Aleyda Solis was conducted, it was discovered that Google might be serving a greater role and being the foundation of some operations behind the scenes.

This unforeseen use has created an industry controversy: Is ChatGPT riding on Google snippets where Bing fails? Provided this is the case, it would alter not only our understanding of browsing possibilities of ChatGPT but also the significance of the traditional SEO.

There was a Simple Test With Shock Results

The Setup: It is a New Page

Spencer Shaw SEO expert Aleyda Solis launched a new web page called LLMs.txt Generators on her site LearningAISearch.com. The goal? In order to determine the speed at which ChatGPT would be able to acquire the content through its web browsing functions.

Originally, ChatGPT was unable to discover the page, implying it was not openly listed or had become out of date, even though it was active and on the web.

Indexed by Google, Bing Failed to Find It

Aleyda registered the page in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Although Google indexed the page fast, Bing was slow. And such an indexing delay would be at the center of the conclusions to come.

Unintended ChatGPT Behavior

After a period of time, ChatGPT brought some partially correct answer regarding the content of the page. It said when asked that it had looked up a cached snippet using web search. Where had that snippet come out?

It Compared with Google Search and Not Bing

After testing the snippet of ChatGPT, Aleyda discovered that it was the same snippet demonstrated in Google Search but not Bing. It was a huge revelation, as, at the time, Bing had not indexed the page, meaning it was evident that ChatGPT was tapping into the information of Google.

“I had an opportunity to compare the piece of texts suggested by ChatGPT with the one presented in Google Search Results, and I was sure that I saw the same information…”
– Spiderweb Crawler Aleyda Solis

The Wider Indications

Aleyda was not the only one. Such observations were also made by other SEO experts who found that the responses provided by ChatGPT were strikingly similar to Google snippets (Kyle Atwater Morley). This gives credence to the hypothesis that ChatGPT might resort to using Google when Bing does not have a cover.

“So ChatGPT is essentially making use of Google snippets in order to formulate respondents?”
– Kyle Atwater Morley

Researchers Theory: Google Fallback

SEO guru St P suggested that:

“On the basis of existing evidence, when the results of Bing are not sufficient or outdated, it seems to resort to Google’s SERP snippet scraping.”

He continued:

“I have witnessed several cases that correlate to this dual-source behavior.”

The Implication This Has to SEO Strategies

This growth reaffirms one of the great lessons: The conventional SEO will be quite applicable in the era of the update. Your Google SERP snippet might feature in the AI-generated answers even in tools where large language models have been applied.

This notion was recently echoed by Gary Illyes of Google where he clarified there is no need of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) other than regular SEO when it comes to ranking in AI Overviews.

Google snippets, This is gold!

With this why, by optimizing your meta titles, descriptions, and headers to Google, you can not only improve conventional rankings, but maybe use AI tools such as ChatGPT. SEO no more is only about the clicks; it is where the AI tools will quote.

ChatGPT Could Also Be Crawling

There is one question, which remains open: did ChatGPT want to crawl the page of Aleyda directly and failed? In that case, which error codes did it get? The review of server logs may provide an answer to this question (is it using indirect access (search snippets) or direct crawling tries which have been blocked?).

In conclusion: Google Search is More Powerful Behind ChatGPT Than You Know

The test results of Aleyda Solis suggest one rather unexpected fact: it turns out that once ChatGPT is not able to find the necessary information on Bing, it appears to resort to using Google Search snippets. The two-headed nature of this behavior implies that what Google provides in your content can still affect the output of AI—even when it is not directly visiting your site.

Due to this, SEO professionals are not supposed to forget about conventional strategies. Quite the opposite, they ought to redouble their efforts on Google-friendly snippets, since those same lines may in fact appear quoted by an AI chatbot, voice assistant, and search interface.

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