Simon Willison asks AI labs to disclose which search engines power their chat tools
Developer Simon Willison called on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta to document the underlying search indexes their chat products rely on.
Developer and independent AI commentator Simon Willison publicly asked AI labs to document which underlying search engines power the web-search features in their chat products. Writing on X, Willison said OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta AI all ship search capabilities but none clearly disclose what index sits behind them. He added that he would at least expect Gemini to be using Google.
The question matters for anyone building on top of these assistants or relying on them for research. The choice of search backend shapes result quality, freshness, geographic coverage, and the kinds of sources that surface — factors that flow directly into answer accuracy and citation reliability. Without disclosure, developers integrating chat-based search into products and buyers evaluating vendors have no way to compare retrieval quality or anticipate blind spots tied to a particular index's crawl and ranking behavior.