OpenAI’s flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, is still pulling real-time answers from Google Search despite the company’s public ambition to undercut the search leader, according to a report by The Information. The outlet says the model accesses the data through the SerpApi scraping service, allowing it to surface up-to-the-minute information on news, sports and financial markets. OpenAI introduced a dedicated search mode for ChatGPT last year, claiming it blended results from the company’s proprietary web crawler, Microsoft’s Bing index and content licensed from publishers. The latest findings indicate Google’s index remains a critical ingredient even after Google turned down OpenAI’s 2024 request for direct access to its search corpus. The revelation underscores a complicated relationship: OpenAI is developing an AI-powered browser meant to challenge Google Chrome, yet it already runs portions of ChatGPT on Google Cloud infrastructure. For Google, the episode illustrates how deeply its index is embedded in the wider internet economy, even among would-be competitors. Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said the disclosure shows that “the death of search is greatly exaggerated,” pointing to Alphabet’s robust second-quarter results as evidence of the franchise’s resilience. Meanwhile, developers testing early builds of the forthcoming GPT-5 report sharper coding, self-correction and autonomous task-handling skills, suggesting OpenAI is pressing ahead with capability upgrades even as the company remains reliant on its rival’s data.