Definition
What is a third-party search provider?
A third-party search provider is a company that sells another company access to a web index through a programming interface (API) rather than through a results page. The customer, for example a conversational assistant, receives addresses, titles and snippets that it reuses in its own way. It receives neither the ranking, nor the layout, nor the features of the original results page.
What the assistant receives and what it does not
Going through a search provider has never meant displaying its results page. The assistant sends a query to the provider's interface and gets back a raw list. The model then decides for itself what it reads, what it keeps and what it cites.
Measurements of ChatGPT published in the summer of 2026 show that in instant mode, the model receives only three elements per result: the title, the address and a snippet. Your position on the original engine's page does not travel with the address.
The case of ChatGPT
OpenAI's official wording, published at the launch of ChatGPT search on October 31, 2024, speaks of “third-party search providers” in the plural, without naming Bing. Bing is named only in the page meant for Enterprise and Edu accounts.
In April 2025, the head of ChatGPT testified under oath that OpenAI had been grounding its answers on third-party search results since 2023. He also described significant quality issues with its partners other than Google. The measurements from the summer of 2026 describe a mix: an index of OpenAI's own on the front line, Google results pages scraped by contractors, then a small share of Bing.
What Bing and Brave sell today
Microsoft shut down its consumer Bing search APIs on August 11, 2025. They were replaced by “Grounding with Bing Search” in Azure, which delivers grounded answers to agents rather than raw results to developers. Microsoft has written since that its index serves to ground AI answers rather than to rank pages for human readers.
Brave also sells access to its index. Its Chief Business Officer stated in July 2025 that its API supplied most of the top ten large language models, without naming customers. Anthropic lists Brave Search on its public list of subprocessors with the label “Web Search”.
A scenario: a fictional equipment rental company holds the top position on Bing for “boom lift rental Laval”. An assistant receives a similar question and queries its sources. It gets the company's address among others, with a title and a snippet of a few lines.
The snippet names neither the service, nor the region, nor a verifiable fact. The model therefore cites a competitor whose snippet answers the question better. The top position on Bing carried nothing over: only the address, the title and the snippet travelled.
We never take “ChatGPT is Bing” as a work instruction. What ChatGPT queries is composite and the mix changes without notice: optimizing for a single provider means working on the smallest of the doors. We work instead on what serves every source at once: crawler access (OAI-SearchBot included), the health of the site on Google and the opening sentences of each page.
Since no provider passes on a rank, we promise no position inside an assistant. We measure by citation, on a fixed sample of questions representative of your customers, asked at regular intervals. Bing Webmaster Tools stays open for its data on grounding queries and citation share.
Not to be confused with
- Independent index
- An independent index describes who builds the index; a third-party search provider describes who sells access to it. Brave is both: it builds its own index and sells it through its API.
- Results page
- The results page is what a person sees in Google or Bing, with a ranking and a layout. The customer of a third-party search provider receives only addresses, titles and snippets.
Related concepts
- Independent index
- Grounding query
- Retrieval crawler
- Optimizing for generated answers
- Query fan-out
- AI Overview
Further reading
- What search engine does ChatGPT use?
- Claude and Brave Search: how to make your website accessible to AI
- AI crawlers: which should you allow or block on your website?
- Measuring AI visibility: which free and paid tools should you use?
- SEO vs. GEO: what's the difference for your online visibility?
Related services
Frequently asked questions
Does ChatGPT use Bing to search the web?
Only in part. OpenAI speaks of third-party search providers in the plural and names Bing only for Enterprise and Edu accounts. Measurements published in the summer of 2026 show an index of OpenAI's own on the front line, Google results scraped by contractors, then a share of Bing that is small but not nil.
Is ranking first on Bing enough to get cited by ChatGPT?
No. A search provider passes on addresses, titles and snippets, not your position. A site ranked first on Bing may never appear in ChatGPT, and a site absent from Bing's first pages may be cited there. What counts is opening sentences that answer the question under a clear H1.
