Google is Now Indexing Bard Conversations

Today Gagan Ghotra, an SEO in Australia, spotted a Google Bard conversation indexed as a Featured Snippet at the top of a Google SERP and posted about it on X (the social media website formerly known as Twitter).

Haha 😂 Google started to index share conversation URLs of Bard 😹 don't share any personal info with Bard in conversation, it will get indexed and may be someone will arrive on that conversation from search and see your info 😳

Also Bard's conversation URLs are ranking as… pic.twitter.com/SKGXJD9KEJ

— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) September 26, 2023

You can see this yourself by going to Google an searching for:

site:bard.google.com

According to Google’s indexing estimation there are about 521 of these conversations indexed so far. This estimation is flawed and inaccurate, but at such a small number it could be close to a real figure (or as close as we can see so far, I was able to count 258 in total).

The indexed conversations include a lot of different languages including English, Hindi, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Romanian, Hebrew, and more. The public posts being indexed seem fairly banal in nature and I wasn’t able to uncover any glaring inaccuracies or private data. Indexable posts include this one from Marie Haynes who used Bared to write a poem about her newsletter: https://bard.google.com/share/af4b11f0c0c6

Google Bard writing a poem for Marie Hayne’s newsletter which is indexed by Google Search now.

As Gagan Ghorta points out these are capable of ranking #1 in Google taking the place of a featured snippet for a specific query. In short meaning that Google trusts their LLM created, spun content, that is derivative of works created by real humans for humans INSTEAD of any of the works that it is based on – completely negating what they claimed they wanted to happen with the Helpful Content Classifier and choking off downstream traffic to websites by not having to give credit for featured snippet.

Google Bard conversation ranking as snippet 😄

Query – why google is not indexing my blogger posts fast. https://t.co/LlsejAdVeV pic.twitter.com/B9Kxp9kfh8

— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) September 26, 2023

In my opinion this would represent a direct attack on the open web and a direct attack on human created content, implying a near future where Google may not need to index websites at all or drive any traffic to a website without getting paid.

That is until Google admitted to this and vowed to block these public chats from being indexed in the search engine. In an article on Search Engine Land “Google to block Bard’s shared chats from showing in Google Search” Barry Schwartz writes “Google will soon block Bard’s shared conversations from appearing in Google Search. Google Bard recently came out with shared conversations that let users publicly share the chats they had with Bard. Soon after Google Search started to discover those URLs, crawl them, and index them.”

None of the shared conversations appear to have Meta Robots noindex tags on them, but the pages do carry a GSC verification tag. I wonder if they are going to do a GSC removal and then get a developer to add the noindex tags later?

In any event for now, there is nothing to worry about. Could Google decide to index some or all of these in the future? Absolutely, and if they do it would be a huge impact to downstream publisher traffic.