Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing?

What OpenAI says

• The launch post (Oct 31, 2024): "ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners." (OpenAI)
• The help page for ordinary accounts: "ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers," and it "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries that it sends those providers." The page then links the Microsoft privacy statement and the Shopify privacy policy. It does not mention Google. It also says ChatGPT doesn't pass your IP address or account details to those providers. (OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT, archived copy of Oct 23, 2026)
• Business workspaces (Enterprise and Edu): ChatGPT "may share disassociated search queries with the Bing search engine to return web results." This page is about business accounts, so it doesn't settle what ordinary accounts use. (OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT search for Enterprise and Edu, archived copy of Sep 19, 2026)

So the only search engine OpenAI names in its own pages is Microsoft's Bing, and only for business workspaces.

When does ChatGPT search the web?

OpenAI says ChatGPT "may search the web automatically when your question would benefit from current information." You can also make it search: choose Search from the tools menu, or type "/" and select Search. People who aren't signed in can use web search too. (OpenAI Help Center)

In practice it often answers without searching. Two studies, measured in different ways:

When ChatGPT doesn't search, it answers from what the model learned in training.

Does ranking on Google get you into ChatGPT?

Not directly. Researchers at the University of Toronto logged the pages ChatGPT's search retrieved for 651 questions, every day for three months, and compared them with Google's and Bing's results for the same searches:

• Only 0.7% of the pages ChatGPT retrieved were in Google's top 10 for the same search, and 0.5% in Bing's.
• 97% were missing from Google's top 50.
• But for 51% of those pages, the website itself did appear in Google's top 50. ChatGPT tends to reach the same websites as Google and pick different pages on them.
• On average ChatGPT consulted 26 pages for a question and cited 3.

Source: Chen and Koudas, "What Drives AI Citations?", arXiv, Oct 10, 2026. Collected through OpenAI's API (the developer version, which the authors note "need not behave like" the ChatGPT app), from a monitoring platform the authors run.

For comparison, even Google's own Gemini, which grounds its answers in Google Search, had only 5.6% of its cited pages in Google's top 10 in the same study.

What it means for your brand

• Let ChatGPT's search crawler in. OpenAI says sites that block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." It is separate from GPTBot, the crawler that collects training data, so you can allow one and block the other (OpenAI crawler docs).
• A good Google ranking helps your website get found, not a particular page. Make sure the page that answers a buyer's question is the one on your site that matches the question's words.
• Many mentions don't come from search at all. In the Toronto study, 46% of ChatGPT's mentions of brands the question didn't name had no cited page behind them: the model named them from memory. That part depends on how widely and consistently your brand is described across the web over time.

More on what tends to work: how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business.