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ChatGPT’s search results come from its own index plus at least eight external providers — not from Bing alone. Peec’s investigation (full study, Sep 2026) mapped every provider visible in ChatGPT’s server-side events and public confirmations:
  • OpenAI’s own crawler and Labrador index — see ChatGPT has its own search index.
  • Bright (very likely Bright Data) — scrapes Google’s web results directly, and separately scrapes Google Maps for local listings.
  • Oxylabs — scrapes Google and feeds the news vertical specifically.
  • A third SERP-scraping channel — tagged simply “serp”, also serving news plus a mixed local-results version.
  • Yelp and TripAdvisor — treated as licensed partners for local data.
  • Two anonymous internal pipes (b1 and b3) — b1 surfaces business websites and Facebook pages, b3 routes to Google Maps.
  • Web IQ — Microsoft’s grounding platform (sub-165ms P95 latency), which Microsoft itself confirms already powers ChatGPT alongside Copilot and Nasdaq.
Direct evidence that Google and Bing still matter (Sep 2026):
  • Google: Malte Landwehr (CPO, Peec) picked a website with zero organic traffic and asked only ChatGPT about it on specific days — Google Search Console showed a traffic spike for that exact site on those days. ChatGPT still queries Google while grounding answers. This is also why a Google ranking loss carries into ChatGPT — see Losing Google rankings kills AI search visibility.
  • Bing: shows up mainly in Deep Research — SSE events during Deep Research sessions reference Bing as a result source, as flagged by Peec researcher David Konitzny.
Strategy consequences the study draws: stop assuming Bing visibility is a proxy for ChatGPT visibility — what looks like Bing may be routed through Microsoft’s Web IQ, a different product. If local listings matter, get Yelp and TripAdvisor right first; Google Maps data reaches ChatGPT anyway, but without you controlling how it is sourced. Source: ChatGPT built its own search index, Peec (Tomek Rudzki), Sep 2026.