Cloudflare and OpenAI pilot: hundreds of millions of new pages added to ChatGPT's index

What the pilot did

Cloudflare and OpenAI launched a research pilot in July 2026. The goal was to find out whether signals from Cloudflare's network could help ChatGPT users discover new content. The companies are now sharing early results.

The pilot used a participating cohort covering about 1% of Cloudflare's total network. During this period, OpenAI discovered and indexed hundreds of millions of new web pages. According to the company, these pages were not previously in its search index.

Why it matters

Many valuable pages on the web get few links: the manual for a specific washing machine model, current passport fees, or a restaurant's latest menu. Cloudflare says network signals helped OpenAI's search crawler find such pages. OpenAI independently evaluates and ranks how those pages appear.

What's next

The team learned some patterns in the journey from discovery to useful answers. For example, bots may repeatedly request files that don't exist, some sites redirect almost any address to their homepage, and other addresses lead to copies of the same content. Recognizing these patterns cuts wasted work before a crawler fetches a page.

Cloudflare is also testing signals that identify and flag potentially harmful pages. The aim is to support safer, more reliable discovery.