For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination: Google Search Console (GSC), a tool that developers typically use to monitor search traffic, not lurk private chats.
Normally, when site managers access GSC performance reports, they see queries based on keywords or short phrases that Internet users type into Google to find relevant content. But starting this September, odd queries, sometimes more than 300 characters long, could also be found in GSC. Showing only user inputs, the chats appeared to be from unwitting people prompting a chatbot to help solve relationship or business problems, who likely expected those conversations would remain private.
Jason Packer, owner of an analytics consulting firm called Quantable, was among the first to flag the issue in a detailed blog last month.