Google to block Bard’s shared chats from showing in Google Search

After Google released shared conversations in Bard, Google Search began crawling and indexing those public chats.

Chat with SearchBot

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.

The issue. Gagan Ghotra posted on X a screenshot showing how a site command for site:bard.google.com/share returned results from Bard. Those results were shared conversations. Here is a screenshot of Bard showing up in the Google Search index:

Bard Google Search Index

Google will block Bard results from Google Search. I asked Google’s Search Liason, Danny Sullivan, about this and he responded on X saying, “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 will soon remove Bard’s shared conversations from showing in Google Search.

Why we care. So if you see Bard’s shared conversations showing up in Google Search, don’t fret it, they should go away in the coming days. Google said it does not want them to show up in Google Search’s index and they are working on blocking them now.

Postscript: 24 hours later, the Bard team blocked these shared conversions using the robots.txt file. The /share director is listed to be disallowed.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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