We Have A new Chapter in the Saga of OpenAI Using Google SERPs?

Brett Tabkeon

The Information is reporting that ChatGPT is sourcing some Google Serps from the well known SerpAPI service.

Lets catch you up on this ongoing saga:

  1. Deep background: OpenAI approached Google in August of 2024 about using Google results in ChatGPT. They were soundly swatted away. We learned it from the DOJ Documents.

     

     

  2. In June 2025 with Olivier de Segonzac reporting on Linkedin that he'd seen Google UTM's in ChatGPT. (that link is in French. I trust you know how to translate.)

     

     

  3. Then SEO super star Aleyda Solis reported that she'd seen the same as well and presented a pretty convincing case that ChatGPT was using Google.

     


     

  4. We got into the act, reporting that it sure looked like OpenAI Google Serp was just coming from Common Crawl and not from OpenAI scraping Google.
  5. Then aHrefs came out with a study this week that said, "no way jose".

     

     

  6. And now we have "The Information" (sorry paywalled) that part of it may be coming from SerpAPI sources.

If in fact, it is coming from SerpAPI, then we are left with more questions: 1) Is OpenAPI subscribing to SerpAPI to pull results? or 2) Is SerpAPI leaving some Google serps laying around for OpenAPI to bump into?

We don't know how/where SerpAPI is acquiring Google Serps for their service. They could be scraping them, or they could be using the Google API to get them. Either way, we've been in the search game long enough to know, SerpAPI's Google feed is almost assuredly going away soon. If they are using Google's search API, it might take some time, but if they are scraping results against Googles TOS, then Google has the ability to finger print (sorta like a watermark) to track serp usage.

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