Google launched shared conversations in Google Bard about a week ago and forgot to ensure search engines can’t index the results. The robots.txt had(s) nothing in it to block bard.google.com/share from being indexed and since Google Search likes to index things, it indexed those public conversations.

Here is a screenshot of what I saw yesterday afternoon (click to enlarge):

Note, this morning when the story went live, Google is showing twice as many URLs in its index than it did yesterday.

This was spotted first by Gagan Ghotra and he posted about it on X. I asked Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liason about this, saying Google Search can’t really be interested in indexing this and he said I am right.

Sullivan wrote, “Bard allows people to share chats, if they choose. We also don’t intend for these shared chats to be indexed by Google Search. We’re working on blocking them from being indexed now.”

Here are those tweets:

Bard allows people to share chats, if they choose. We also don’t intend for these shared chats to be indexed by Google Search. We’re working on blocking them from being indexed now.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) September 26, 2023

I suspect Bard will add this to its robots.txt file to block it from being crawled by Google Search? Or maybe Google will do something different to block these chats from showing up in Google Search?

The wild thing is that if Google indexes these shared conversations, it can alter what Google Search validates as being accurate in Bard – remember this?

And yea, some of those Bard conversations were selected as featured snippets by Google Search:

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

But John won’t be helping:

Given our honest results policy, the folks from Search are also not going to help them to figure this out. There’s public documentation on how verification, noindex, robots.txt, etc works.

— John, aka “a total bell cheese” (@JohnMu) September 26, 2023

This kinda goes into it: https://t.co/ol6JSb7GHq — though tbh it’s been a while since I listened in.

— John, aka “a total bell cheese” (@JohnMu) September 26, 2023

Forum discussion at X.