Given OpenAI’s close relationship with Microsoft, many expect that ChatGPT’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process would use Bing.
However, over the past months, some SEOs discovered that ChatGPT may have secretly pivoted to using Google instead.
These were all one-off experiments. So, I wondered if it was possible for us to find out the ‘truth’ using data instead.
Here’s what we found.
- She pulled the actual search queries ChatGPT made (“fan-out queries”) and the URLs it returned from those searches. This data is from our Ahrefs Brand Radar.
- She then ran those exact same search queries through Google to see what URLs Google would return
- She measured how often ChatGPT’s returned URLs appeared in Google’s top 10, top 20, and anywhere in Google’s search results.
On average, ChatGPT pulls 1.78 search queries per prompt, with 75% of prompts triggering exactly two searches.
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