Cases › leaked private data › LR-2026-0323

ChatGPT private chats indexed and exposed on Google Search

Preliminary Why: Publisher not yet named · subject to change

Status: no action reported

Severity moderate

Reported 13 Nov 2025

Developer and model OpenAI

No source states: loss or records, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.

ChatGPT's browsing mode, which lets the chatbot look things up online, was the system involved. Some user conversations were routed through a 'hints=search' tag that caused parts of prompts to be added to URLs. Google indexed those URLs, so private conversation fragments appeared in Google Search results and were visible to unrelated website owners. Developers noticed the problem in Google Search Console dashboards, and analytics researcher Jason Packer and consultant Slobodan Manić investigated. OpenAI confirmed the issue, said it affected only a limited number of searches, and stated the glitch has been fixed. The sources do not say how long it existed or how many users were affected.

What happened

1 · What went wrongSome conversations were routed through a hints=search tag, which added parts of user prompts to URLs.

2 · What it reached or didGoogle indexed those URLs, and the private fragments became visible to unrelated website owners.

What was done

No source states an action or fix.

Risks

Privacy harm to a person
Primary41 incidents

Sorted by rule from the case's fields; not yet read from the sources.

Controls

Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:

Application

Data minimisation · Sensitive-data checks on outbound data · Human approval for high-impact actions · Output filtering and redaction · People told they are dealing with AI · Risk assessment per deployment

Infrastructure / target

Bot and scraping defences

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Evidence

No source states: what the AI was doing, how it was caught, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off, what was done.

Show the full account: 2 items from the primary sources

What happened, in order

Not dated in the sources:

OpenAI confirmed the issue.
OpenAI stated the glitch has been fixed.

Show every field, with its source and grade

The AI system

Developer

OpenAI

C one secondary source states it

What happened

Earliest source we hold

2025-11-13

D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown

What went wrong

leaked private data

C one secondary source states it

Impact

Severity

moderate

D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown

Kind of harm

privacy

C one secondary source states it

Notes on gaps

An earlier, separate incident of shared chat links being indexed is mentioned in the source and was excluded because it is not this incident.

LR-2026-0323 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON