> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.peec.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# ChatGPT has its own search index — the Labrador family

> Peec's investigation (Sep 2026) — ChatGPT runs its own retrieval index, internally called Labrador, a family of vertical indexes for web, PDF, YouTube, news, shopping and more.

ChatGPT runs its own retrieval index, internally called Labrador — not just Bing or Google. Peec's investigation ([full study](https://peec.ai/blog/chatgpt-built-its-own-search-index), Sep 2026) found the evidence directly in ChatGPT's server-side events (SSE): between May 21 and July 21, 2026, a `result_source` field carried exactly four values — Labrador, Bright, Oxylabs, and SERP. Three are external scraping providers; Labrador is OpenAI's own index.

Labrador is not one index but a family of vertical ones: general web, PDF, YouTube, news (with separate tiers for the last day, last 7 days, and older), arXiv, Wikipedia, local, finance (including a separate PDF index), legal, medical, shopping, and images. It stores what Google's index stores — full page content, crawl date, and publication date. This is the same architecture Google spent two decades building: a general web index plus specialized verticals layered on top.

Corroborating evidence from the Sep 2026 investigation:

* **OpenAI job postings.** One asks for "designing and operating indexing systems, retrieval pipelines, and serving layers"; another describes running indexing services behind ChatGPT at **exabyte scale** with vector search. A research role targets dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval — the setup for the Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) merging that Peec researcher Metehan Yesilyurt [documented first](https://metehan.ai/blog/chatgpt-is-using-reciprocal-rank-fusion-rrf/).
* **Antitrust testimony.** During Google's antitrust trial, Nick Turley (head of ChatGPT) [testified](https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1402141/dl) that OpenAI had "significant quality issues" with non-Google search API partners, that Google refused to license its index, and that OpenAI began building its own search index in 2023 — targeting 80% of queries from it by end of 2023. He also said that even with full access to Google's data, it would take at least five years to determine whether answering 100% of queries from its own index is achievable.

ChatGPT still is not running on its own pipelines alone — it blends the Labrador index with Google, Microsoft and at least eight outside providers; see [Where ChatGPT search results come from](/research/chatgpt-search-result-providers). The index push is most visible in shopping — see [ChatGPT Shopping runs on OpenAI's own product index](/research/chatgpt-shopping-index-experiments).

**Source:** [ChatGPT built its own search index](https://peec.ai/blog/chatgpt-built-its-own-search-index), Peec (Tomek Rudzki), Sep 2026.