Google To Block Bard Public Shared Conversations From Google Search

Google To Block Bard Shared Conversations From Google Search

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:

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

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:

I wonder if they have to claim each subdomain in GSC and it's an internal red tape nightmare to get authorization.

There is a Site Verification tag in the shared convo pages code. If we go back in Archive I wonder if it is always there or was an afterthought.

— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) September 26, 2023

Ah yes that's a fair point and yes I was just thinking I'm sure your team have created plenty of documentation for them

— @iwanow@aus.social (@davidiwanow) September 26, 2023

Update: Later today, the Bard team blocked these conversations using robots.txt:

It's blocked now via robots.txt. Note, urls can still be indexed when blocked by robots.txt, just w/out Google crawling the content. But Google shouldn't surface those often in the SERPs (but it can...) Just a heads up. Also, they should use the removals tool for what's indexed: https://t.co/oQM84YvrfU pic.twitter.com/N2kiTMF5Zd

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 27, 2023

Update 2: The Bard results are gone from Google Search:

Bard shared conversations no longer showing up in Google Search for me https://t.co/eRKfGtEC7O - original story at https://t.co/GmWAoXMMYM pic.twitter.com/Gu6wLlBphq

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) September 28, 2023

Update 3: Jack from the Bard team chimed in, he said:

We know that people put their trust in Google, and we take that responsibility very seriously. That’s why, by default, Bard chats are not publicly accessible.

We do allow users to publicly share their own Bard chats, if they choose; a given chat is publicly shared only after the user confirms that they want to create a public link with that chat.

Of all the chats that users have chosen to publicly share, only a subset were indexed in Google. These indexed chats were those that users had chosen to publicly share and that were also linked to from blog posts, forums or other public web pages.

We’ve now removed those chats from Google Search, and blocked users’ shared chats from being listed in search results.

We know that people put their trust in Google, and we take that responsibility very seriously. That’s why, by default, Bard chats are not publicly accessible.

We do allow users to publicly share their own Bard chats, if they choose; a given chat is publicly shared only after…

— Jack Krawczyk (@JackK) September 28, 2023

Then Glenn Gabe responded, to which Danny Sullivan from Google responded:

I see you found the Removals tool in GSC! That's a smart move. :) Also worth noting that disallow + noindex = Google not being able to see the noindex tag. More: https://t.co/tkb5mkMGVQ

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 28, 2023

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