Your shared AI chats can end up on Google. How to check
Share links in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok publish a page on the open web. Here is how to find yours, revoke them, and deal with one that is indexed.
A share link feels like sending someone a file. In most AI assistants it is closer to publishing a page. The address sits on the open web, the page renders in a logged-out browser, and whether it turns up in Google comes down to one tag in the HTML that you cannot see and did not set.
That protection has failed at least twice, at two companies with serious security teams. So the check comes first here, the reasoning second. Open four tabs, work through the list below, and the explanation will still be here when you come back.
Do this part first
ChatGPT: Settings, then Data controls, then Manage next to Shared links. Delete them one at a time, or open More actions and select Delete all shared links.
Claude: Settings, then Privacy, then Manage next to Shared chats. The modal lists each shared chat with its title, date and link, and an Unshare control beside it.
Gemini: go to gemini.google.com, click Settings & help at the bottom, then Your public links. Delete individually, or use Delete all links.
Grok: sign in at grok.com, go to grok.com/share-links, and click Remove next to any link.
You will recognise most of what is on that list. The entries you cannot place are the ones that matter, and there are usually a few, because a share link takes one click next to an answer you liked, costs nothing, never expires, and leaves no trace in the conversation itself. Open those and read what is on the page rather than the title. Titles are generated from the first message, and the sensitive part of a conversation is rarely the first message.
Google's naming is the most honest of the four. The others call the feature "shared chats". Google calls the page "Your public links", which is precisely what it is.
Four products, four different meanings of the same button
What the recipient gets, whether they need an account, and whether they can carry on talking to the model all vary by product, and that changes what you should be comfortable sharing.
Product | What the link exposes | Opens without an account | Recipient can continue the conversation | Where you revoke it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ChatGPT (personal account) | A snapshot as it stood when you created or last updated the link. Later messages are not included. Can include images and uploaded files. | Yes, for anyone holding a personal-account link. | Yes. Continuing it "creates a separate, private conversation in the recipient's account". | Settings, Data controls, Shared links |
ChatGPT (Business, Enterprise, Edu workspace) | A conversation link that can include messages added after sharing | No. Only eligible members of the same workspace. | Yes, within the workspace | Same path, Shared links |
Claude, public link | A view-only snapshot of the chat | Yes. "Anyone with the link can open it. No Claude account is required." | No. "It's view only. Viewers can't continue the chat." | Settings, Privacy, Shared chats, or the Share menu |
Claude, invited people | A view-only snapshot, plus your name shown as the sharer | No. The invite email prompts sign-up, and a free account is enough to view. | No. Recipients also cannot copy it to their account or download files from it. | Share dialog, under People with access |
Gemini | The entire conversation, including generated artifacts: Canvas documents, images and videos. Frozen at the moment you created the link. | Yes. "Anyone with the link can read the chat, even if you didn't share the link with them directly." | Yes, on their own Google account, with exceptions for chats made with Gems and for users under 18 | gemini.google.com, Settings & help, Your public links |
Grok | A public share link to the conversation | Yes | Not stated in xAI's published FAQ | grok.com/share-links |
MultiChats | No public share link exists. See the last section. | Not applicable | Not applicable | Nothing to revoke |
Two details in that table deserve more than a cell. The first is snapshot behaviour. A ChatGPT personal link and a Gemini public link both freeze at creation, so a conversation you shared at message six stays at message six whatever you type afterwards. A workspace link in ChatGPT does not, and OpenAI's documentation says so directly: it "can include messages added after sharing". If you shared a thread with Business or Enterprise colleagues in March, everything added since March may be visible to them.
The second is continuation. On Gemini and ChatGPT, whoever opens your link can keep talking to the model from where you left off. On Gemini, if their Keep Activity setting is on, your conversation lands in their Gemini Apps activity under their Google Account, and deleting your public link later does not reach in and remove it. Claude went the other way: both its sharing modes are view-only, the more conservative design and the reason its shared pages carry less onward risk.
Why this keeps happening at companies that know better
In late July 2026 Reddit users searched site:claude.ai/share and found conversations. BBC News, in a report 9to5Mac carried at the time, counted more than 200 of them across at least 25 pages of results, including a lawyer asking whether they had to self-report a breach of conduct and a user who exposed their crypto wallet keys while asking for help setting one up. WIRED reviewed a sample of the exposed pages and found that they did not carry a noindex tag. Anthropic's initial response was that "When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services", which sidestepped the missing tag. The results were at least partly gone within days.
Almost exactly a year earlier, in August 2025, TechCrunch reported that hundreds of thousands of Grok conversations had become searchable on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, citing Forbes. The cause was the same: the share button minted a URL, and the URL was indexable. That report also notes the same problem had recently hit ChatGPT and Meta's AI chatbot.
The mechanism behind all of this is worth understanding once, because it explains why the fix is fragile. robots.txt and noindex are different levers. A robots.txt file asks crawlers not to fetch a path. A noindex tag sits inside a page that has already been fetched and asks the search engine not to list it. Fetch claude.ai/robots.txt right now and the general rule for all crawlers blocks only /api/ and /lti/ paths. Share pages are left crawlable by design, and the per-page noindex tag is the whole of the defence. Anthropic's own documentation now describes it in those terms: "Every shared chat page carries a 'noindex' instruction, which is the standard way to tell Google and other search engines not to show a page in search results." One tag, applied at render time, on every share page, forever. Any change to how those pages are built can drop it, and nothing visible to you changes when it does.
The vendors are, to their credit, fairly candid about the limits. OpenAI's help page states: "Shared link pages are not intended for search-engine indexing, but this does not make a link private. Anyone who can access a link can also forward it." xAI's FAQ is blunter still: "Any share link you generate will be accessible to anyone you choose to share the link with. For example, if you share the link publicly on a social media platform, it may be subject to indexing by a search engine (e.g., Google) just like any other publicly shared content." Anthropic's documentation makes the same point about forums and social feeds. Read together, those three statements say that indexing protection is a convention, and that posting the link anywhere public defeats it regardless of the tag.
If one of yours is already out there
Start by looking. In Google, the site: operator restricts results to one path, and each product uses a predictable one: site:chatgpt.com/share, site:claude.ai/share and site:grok.com/share. Gemini issues its links in the form g.co/gemini/share/abcxyz, so search that string instead. That shows what is indexed on that path from everyone: a sanity check on the platform, a poor way to find your own. For that, take a distinctive sentence out of a conversation you shared, one unusual enough that nobody else would write it, and search it inside quotation marks. Repeat on Bing and DuckDuckGo, since the Grok chats surfaced on all three.
If something of yours comes back, revoke the link before anything else, using the paths at the top of this article. That makes the page stop resolving, which is the necessary first step and only the first step. A search index is a cache. Removing a page from a site does not remove it from Google, and the entry can survive for a while with a stale title and snippet still describing the contents.
Google's own guidance splits the remedies by ownership. A request through the Removals tool in Search Console "usually takes up to a day to process, and is not guaranteed to be accepted", but "you must own the property in Search Console to use this tool", and a successful removal "lasts only about six months" anyway. Neither point helps with a conversation on someone else's domain. For a page you do not own, Google points to the Refresh Outdated Content tool, which fits this situation exactly: it covers a page that "no longer exists on the web, or has been updated, but the old result is still returned in Google Search results". None of it reaches Bing or DuckDuckGo, which run their own indexes, so a request to Google leaves those where they were.
What none of that touches is copies. If someone saved a ChatGPT link and continued it, that conversation is in their account. If a shared Gemini chat was continued, it is in their activity. If an archiving service picked the page up, revoking the link does nothing to the archive, which is the uncomfortable half of Anthropic's statement about third-party archiving. Revocation is instant and de-indexing takes days to weeks, but a copy someone else already holds cannot be recovered at any speed. That gap is the actual argument for treating the share button as publication.
What happens when you share from MultiChats
We do not have public share links, and a reader who arrived here worried about this has one less thing to check.
That comes out of the code and you can hold us to it. There is no share route in the web app. The conversation record in our database has no public or shared field on it: its visibility value is either visible or archived, and that is a distinction between your sidebar and your archive, both of which are yours. Every read of a conversation or a message goes through an authenticated query scoped to the owner's user ID, so there is no code path that returns your messages to anyone else.
Two things in the product carry the word "share" or "link", and both do less than the name suggests. "Copy chat link", in the conversation menu on web and mobile, copies your own app URL for that conversation. Someone else opening it signs in to their own account and sees their own chats, because the query behind the page filters by their user ID and finds nothing of yours. The per-message share button on web hands the text of that one message to your browser or operating system share sheet, with no URL attached and no record created on our side. Neither of them publishes a page, so there is no list of share links in settings and nothing to revoke. Deleting a conversation is the whole of the control, and our privacy policy commits to hiding it immediately and removing it from our systems within 30 days.
One more thing belongs on this page and not only in the policy. We do not train on your conversations. Some providers may, depending on which model you pick, and we tell you which on the model information card in the picker. Six models currently carry a privacy notice there, and the wording is each provider's own position rather than a line we wrote about ourselves. The open-weight models routed through OpenRouter are described as "Routed via OpenRouter to third-party providers that may briefly retain requests; they do not train on your data". The two Grok entries say the opposite about training, in equally plain words. Either one is there to read before you send, and the full picture is in our privacy policy.
Sharing an AI conversation is publishing, in every product that offers it. The check at the top of this page takes about four minutes and you will only need to do it properly once. Do it while you are thinking about it.