We’re curious people so, every day, we analyse numerous ChatGPT responses to a wide variety of prompts. In recent weeks, we’ve noticed that ChatGPT uses web searches significantly less frequently.
LLMs are known to struggle with timeliness and tend to fabricate facts (“hallucinations”). To counteract this, some models rely on external backends. ChatGPT, for example, regularly uses web searches to supplement its internal knowledge.
At least when using the app without an account, the proportion of responses completed by a web search has declined sharply in the last two weeks: from over 15% to currently less than 2.5%.
ChatGPT traditionally uses Bing as its default search engine due to its close ties to Microsoft. However, in recent months, rumors have circulated that Google data was also being used without direct cooperation. Whether the decline is related to Google’s recent measures against crawling its own search results is up to you to judge.
