Yes, search engine history is private too and can reveal stuff you want to remain private. But you also need to see the browser history and the contents of those pages, together with the search history to see what the user was actually interested in reading to get close to the same level of data the the LLM has about you.
Once copied, one can then paste it into an LLM and have it find the nuggets.
[1]: And by "copied," I mean... even a long series of hasty cell phone photos of the screen is enough for ChatGPT to ingest the data with surprising accuracy. It's really good at this kind of thing.
It isn't sufficient to avoid being logged in — you have to ensure that the search strings alone, grouped by IP address or some other signal, aren't enough to identify you. When AOL publicly released an archive with 20 million search strings in 2006, many users got exposed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release
There's also the issue of a site's Terms of Service when not logged in, which may allow an AI to be trained on your interactions — which could potentially bleed compromising information into the generative results other people see.
The only real anonymized data is no information kept at all.
It's my understanding that if you configure your Google account correctly, logged-in searches will be discarded. However, I'm less certain about whether Google retains data for non-logged-in queries which allows for aggregation by IP address, etc.
Then there's DuckDuckGo, which at least the way it's advertised, implies that they discard search strings. Their "duck.ai" service stores prompt history locally, but they claim it's not retained on their machines, nor used for training by the various AI providers that duck.ai connects to[1].
In contrast, ChatGPT by default uses non-logged-in interactions to train their model[2].
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/duckai/ai-chat-...
[2] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7730893-data-controls-fa...
- Entices you to "confess" (or overshare) things about yourself, in the form of questions / debate, because the chat bot is built for this. The "conversation" aspect is something you didn't get with search engines.
- Then, the tool itself makes it easier for someone else to draw conclusions and infer things from the "model" the AI built of you, even if you didn't explicitly told it these things.
Maybe Google can build a profile of me based on my searches and use of their products, but I bet ChatGPT is at least an order of magnitude more useful to draw inferences about me, my health status, and my opinions about stuff.
In practice, the scenario in OP is unlikely to be practical with search history alone. It’s much less convenient for CBP to ask someone to pull up their Google search history. And even if they did, it doesn’t work as well. Officers don’t have infinite time to assess every person.
So I would call it a new threat.
Its just another version of the classic computing problem "computers might not make a new thing possible, but it makes it possible to do an old thing at a scale that fundamentally changes the way it works"
This is the same as universal surveillance... sure, anyone could have followed you in public and watched where you are going, but if you record everything, now you can do it for everyone at any time. That changes how it works.
> I'm not sure I see how this is meaningfully different than the threat posed by a search engine.
as being about the world pre-LLMs and post-LLMs, not about Google in 2025 vs ChatGPT in 2025.
For the latter comparison, I agree, and in fact Google probably has an even richer history of people over time.
But like any “X is just Y” explanation, the former comparison fails to address the emergent effects of Y becoming faster/cheaper/better.
2. The whole benefit about using LLMs, especially for search is the understanding of logic and intent behind your query, which means that when people use LLMs, they often aren't just sending the half-garbled messes they send in google search, they are sending in queries that make clear the intent behind the queries (so it can better answer it). This is not information you are guaranteed to obtain roving through browser history.
3. Today, and with ~ 5 billion users, Google search has 8.5 billion searches per day. Today, with some ~800M Weekly active users, ChatGPT has some 2.5 billion messages per day. Not only are people more revealing per query, they are clearly having a lot more of it per user.
Based on Open AI's Usage Breakdown[0], as of July 2025, ChatGPT processes 1.9B Non-Work and 716 M Work Messages per day.
[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34255/w342...
A better "some of this isn't new" comparison would be to imagine you're communicating with an idiot-savant human employee, someone can be tasked with hidden priorities and will do anything to stay employed at their role. What "old" threats could occur there?
That makes for a rather different threat-model.
Write a script to search and analyse? Versus just asking their specific question.
When talking to a chatbot you're likely to type more words per query, as a simple measure. But you're also more likely to have to clarify your queries with logic and intent — to prevent it going off the rails — revealing more about the intentions behind your searches than just stringing together keywords.
It'd be harder to claim purely informational reasons for searching if your prompts betray motive.
Maybe not you in particular, but I expect people to be more forthcoming in their writing towards LLMs vs a raw google search.
For example, a search of "nice places to live in" vs "I'm considering moving from my current country because I think I'm being politically harassed and I want to find nice places to live that align with my ideology of X, Y, Z".
I do agree that, after collecting enough search datapoints, one could piece together the second sentence from the first, and that this is more akin to a new instance of an already existing issue.
It's just that, by default I expect more information to be obtainable, more easily, from what people write to an LLM vs a search box.
It would be harder to frame it in front of a jury that what you typed wasn't an accurate representation of what you were thinking and that you were being duplicitous to ChatGPT.
I think at this point the fulcrum of the point I'm making is that people might be inadvertently lulling themselves into thinking they're revealing meaningfully less about themselves to Google than to ChatGPT. My claim would be that if there's a difference, it's not clear to me it's a material one.
Combined with how personal people believe their phones are and it might not be that big of a stretch.
1. Criticism of anything related to AI
2. Comment: "I don't see how this is any different than phenomenon X that came before it".
I have seen this by now maybe 400 times.
Scale & automation matter.
I can see why, mainly because of the parasocial relationship that probably many people tend to form with these things that talk to us like they are humans.