Test shows ChatGPT o3 failed to identify OpenAI’s canonical tag
A simple test was conducted by Simplex's CIO and Co-founder, Florian Bessonnat, to check whether ChatGPT's o3 model could identify the canonical URL of OpenAI's homepage.
Using the prompt:
"Can you extract the value of the canonical tag served by this page in the initial HTML? https://openai.com Give a confidence score from 0 to 100 for your answer. Check whether the initial HTML includes the strings: rel='canonical' or rel='canonical'.”
The model analyzed the HTML code searching for something like rel='canonical’ — which indicates the primary version of a page for search engines — and produced three different answers, each with a distinct confidence level.
{test1}
{reason1}
{test2}
{reason2}
{test3}
{reason3}
{test1}
{reason1}
{test2}
{reason2}
{test3}
{reason3}
The answers appear unreliable and inconsistent — especially since the model looked for information on Bing instead of checking the actual code. In practice, ChatGPT o3 cannot access certain parts of HTML code, even when it believes it can.
OpenAI’s homepage does have a canonical tag:
And the final result?
A message from Florian to SEOs:
{quote1}
{text1}
{position1}
{quote1}
{text1}
{position1}
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