- The mechanism is old web behavior, not an AI flaw: share features generate public URLs, search engines index them — Google Docs and Dropbox links included. DuckDuckGo and Brave often keep them indexed longer than Google.
- Shared Google Docs URLs are 0.000217% of all URLs in AI retrieval — statistically negligible, but present. Each engine favors a file type: Google AI Overviews surfaces Documents, ChatGPT Presentations, Perplexity Spreadsheets.
- Reuse differs sharply by engine (Jul 2026 data). For 68.9% of affected prompts the Docs link is a one-off random hit. But Perplexity’s reuse rates are 5–8× higher than other engines — one in eight affected Perplexity prompts reuses the same Docs URL in over half its chats (median 76.9%). Google AI Overview shows the opposite: broadest discovery, lowest stickiness (1.52%).
Shared URLs and leaked chats in AI retrieval — rare but real
David Konitzny’s analysis (Jul 2026) — shared Google Docs URLs are 0.000217% of URLs in AI retrieval but do appear; Perplexity reuses a found Docs link 5–8× more consistently than other engines.
Leaked AI chats and shared document URLs do enter AI retrieval pipelines — at microscopic rates. David Konitzny analyzed the 2026 wave of indexed shared chats (Claude, DeepSeek, following ChatGPT in 2024) and traced shared URLs into retrieval (full article, Jul 2026):