A recent report raises concerns about ChatGPT's competition with Google by revealing that it may use a scraping service to deliver real-time updates based on Google search results.

Have you ever questioned how ChatGPT responds to your inquiries in real time? OpenAI's ChatGPT has less success than competitors like Gemini and Grok, who have their own online platforms for data scraping. According to a recent article, Sam Altman's ChatGPT may be primarily dependent on Google to provide results. Ironically, OpenAI's ChatGPT is determined to overtake Google as the most used search engine.

According to the report from The Information, ChatGPT uses a proprietary program that pulls information from Google Search. Given that Google purportedly rejected OpenAI's request for direct access to their search index—a wealth of online data for any AI chatbot—this seems intriguing.

The report claims that OpenAI is extracting current Google search results via a commercial web scraping service named SerpApi. This approach enables ChatGPT to provide up-to-date, real-time information on subjects like sports, financial markets, and news—all of which are areas in which its own AI models are still in the early stages of development. Abhishek Iyer, a former Google developer, backed up the findings by showing that ChatGPT could get data from simulated pages that Google alone indexed.

Although Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has made it clear that he no longer utilizes Google Search for his own searches, the fact that his firm uses Google data for its own products raises the possibility of a dependency. Nick Turley, the leader of ChatGPT, said during a Google antitrust case that OpenAI had applied for and been denied access to Google's search index. Turley further highlighted the importance of Google's data by pointing out that search results from Microsoft's Bing, another data source for ChatGPT, had "significant quality issues."

Any AI chatbot wouldn't be aware of current events if it didn't have access to a current database. Because of the outdated datasets they utilized for training, ChatGPT's earlier iterations were at a disadvantage. Conversely, Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok have a competitive edge since they have consistently used Google Search and X, respectively, as their data sources.