Okay, so this was an awesome article posted last week by Alexis Royoko. It was shared by Alita Solless, where Alexis basically argued that ChatGPT search is using the Google index more heavily than it ever has before — possibly even replacing the Bing index with the Google index.
I thought this was fascinating, albeit a pretty big claim. I did share in the post I shared that I said, “Hey, I’m seeing evidence too that it looks like ChatGPT is using more of Google’s index.” So I’m going to go through some of Alexis’s hypotheses and kind of share where I think there’s overlap — and maybe where there’s not — in terms of whether or not ChatGPT is using the Google search results.
Claim 1: There’s a lot of overlap between ChatGPT and Google search results
Overall, I would agree.
I searched some of the same queries Alexis did. For example, I searched for “best beginner tennis rackets”. I then used ChatGPT’s path extractor to say, “Hey, which queries is ChatGPT searching?” Here, it searched for “best beginner tennis rackets 2025”.
I did a Google search for that and a Bing search. Even before comparing results, you can just feel that ChatGPT’s result looks more like traditional Google results. Like here’s the Reddit thread, here’s tennisnerd.net, and in the “more” section there are YouTube videos, more Reddit threads, and actual forum results — that just looks like a Google result.
When I actually look at the Google results, they look very similar:
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Reddit thread (repeated)
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Talk Tennis forum article
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Tennisnerd again
So yeah, a ton of overlap.
In Bing, there’s still some overlap, but not nearly as much. I did the same search in Bing — I saw Tennis Warehouse and Tennis Tribe results — but no YouTube videos, no Reddit threads. We know those are inherently Google features.
When I test this across other queries, I see the same thing — so that part seems to track. There’s a ton of overlap with Google search results.
Claim 2: ChatGPT is using Google’s index to solve JavaScript rendering limitations
Alexis also suggested that ChatGPT could be using Google’s index as a workaround for its inability to navigate JavaScript-rendered pages.
He used an example from Uniqlo, where the site was recently redesigned. He said:
“If you go to a sample product page, it looks blank. But if you ask ChatGPT search, it can find the content on that product page.”
So I wanted to test that too.
My results were less conclusive. I went in and asked ChatGPT, “Hey, what’s on this page?” — using a page I knew was JavaScript-rendered. Surprisingly, ChatGPT was able to surface the content.
But when I looked deeper, it seemed like it didn’t actually use that page. It kind of stitched information together. For example, I used a URL in the French domain, but ChatGPT pulled content from the English (US) domain version instead. So it worked around the rendering by pulling in available alternatives.
Then, when I explicitly asked it to read the page in the French directory, it said it couldn’t.
So my take: ChatGPT still does not have JavaScript rendering capability, and I don’t think it’s solving that through Google’s index. It just found alternate, crawlable pages instead.
Claim 3: URL parameters (SSR ID) point to Google indexing
This was probably the most compelling piece of evidence Alexis presented.
He noticed that ChatGPT search URLs often include a “SSR” ID parameter, which is specific to Google search.
This parameter is used by Google to track a lot of commerce results, and you can clearly see it appearing in ChatGPT search citations.
For example, go to the Tennis Warehouse article cited in ChatGPT. The link contains that SSR ID. When I searched in Bing and looked at their index, none of the URLs have that parameter — you just won’t see it.
This is a pretty strong indication that ChatGPT is pulling directly from Google’s index, because that SSR parameter is specific to Google only.
Final Verdict
So, right now, if I had to advise clients, I would say:
Yes, ChatGPT search is using Google’s index more heavily than ever.
It might even be the dominant index source.
I do still believe they are stitching in some Bing results — but the evidence strongly suggests that Google is the primary source.
Hopefully that helps provide some database-level analysis of which index engine ChatGPT search is actually using.
