The OpenAI content agreement will enhance ChatGPT with the ability to display real-time content with links in response to queries. OpenAI quietly took steps to get more search engine-type functionality as part of a content licensing agreement that may have positive implications for publishers and SEO.
Content License Agreement
OpenAI entered into a content license agreement with the Financial Times, a global news organization with offices in London, New York, continental Europe and Asia.
Content licensing agreements between AI organizations and publishers are generally about access to high-quality training data. Linguistic models use training data to learn connections between words and concepts. This agreement goes far beyond this use.
ChatGPT will display direct quotes with attribution
What makes this content license agreement between The Financial Times and OpenAI is that there is a reference to attributing content within ChatGPT.
The advertised license agreement explicitly mentions the use of the licensed content so that ChatGPT can directly quote from it and provide links to the licensed content.
Additionally, the license agreement is intended to help improve the “usefulness” of ChatGPT, which is vague and can mean many things, but takes on a slightly different meaning when used in the context of attributed responses.
The Financial Times Agreement states that the license agreement is used in ChatGPT when you provide “attributed content” which is content with attribution, usually a link to where the content appeared.
Here’s the part of the ad that refers to the attributed content:
“The Financial Times today announced a licensing agreement and strategic partnership with OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence research and deployment, to enhance ChatGPT with attributed content, help improve the usefulness of its models by incorporating FT journalism and co ·work on the development of new AI products and features for FT readers.
And here’s the part of the ad that mentions ChatGPT offering users quotes and attributed links:
“Through the partnership, ChatGPT users will be able to see attributed summaries, citations and links to FT journalism in response to relevant queries.”
The CEO of the Financial Times Group was even more explicit about OpenAI’s intention to display content and links on ChatGPT:
“This is a significant deal in several respects,” said John Ridding, chief executive of FT Group. “It recognizes the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us an early look at how content emerges through AI. … this partnership will help us stay ahead of the evolution of how people access and use information.
OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution and compensation…
Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, made direct reference to displaying real-time news content on ChatGPT, but more importantly he referenced OpenAI exploring new ways to display content to its user base.
Finally, the COO stated that they embraced disruption, which means innovation that creates a new industry or paradigm, usually at the expense of an older one, such as search engines.
Lightcap is quoted:
“We have always embraced new technology and disruption, and we will continue to operate with curiosity and vigilance as we navigate this next wave of change.”
Showing direct quotes from Financial Times content with links to that content is very similar to how search engines work. This is a big change in how ChatGPT works and could be a sign of where ChatGPT is going in the future, functionality that incorporates online content with links to that content.
Another possibly related thing
Someone on Twitter recently noticed a change related to “search” in relation to ChatGPT.
This change involves an SSL security certificate that has been added for a subdomain of ChatGPT.com. ChatGPT.com is a domain name that someone took to take advantage of the 2022 ChatGPT announcement by OpenAI. OpenAI eventually acquired the domain and has been redirecting to ChatGPT.
The change that was noticed is in the subdomain: search.chatgpt.com.
This is a screenshot of the tweet:
Great news for SEOs and publishers
This is important news for publishers and search marketers ChatGPT will become a valuable source of traffic if OpenAI takes ChatGPT in the direction of providing attributed summaries and direct quotes.
How can publishers get traffic from ChatGPT?
There are questions about attributed citations with links in response to relevant queries. Here are X unknowns about links attributed to ChatGPT.
Does this mean that only licensed content will be displayed and linked to ChatGPT? Will ChatGPT incorporate and use most web data without license agreements in the same way that search engines do? OpenAI may incorporate an opt-in model where publishers can use a notation in Robots.txt or metadata to opt-in to receive traffic from ChatGPT. Would you opt to receive traffic from ChatGPT in exchange for allowing your content to be used for training? How would the SEO and publisher equation change at ChatGPT if all your competitors are getting traffic from ChatGPT?
Read the original announcement:
Financial Times announces strategic partnership with OpenAI
Featured image by Shutterstock/Photo For Everything
