ChatGPT Index: Small Sites Served Like Licensed Partners

New data suggests that OpenAI's in-house search index serves small websites in the same way it treats its licensed partners. This finding comes from Resoneo, a French SEO consultancy. They analyzed over 1,200 ChatGPT answers from July. Resoneo discovered that a licensing deal did not change how a webpage was served by OpenAI's "labrador" index. The format, length, and freshness were consistent for both partners and non-partners. This index often handled questions with settled answers, local businesses, and products in free accounts. For paid accounts using "thinking mode," Google scraping provided about 75% of search results, while the in-house index accounted for around 24%. The bottom line is this shows how OpenAI's search capabilities might be impacting a wider range of online content than previously understood.