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ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Many have asked if it is the new way to do a search. This question is intriguing given the potentially massive impact on the search engine business space and the competitive elements within it. However, that is not the question I am asking – in this article – I explore a related question – if you have a business that has relied on search engine optimization (SEO) for traffic and relevance, where does that leave you? the ChatGPT?
Chat vs Search
There is a fundamental difference in user intent between chat and classic search (regardless of who provides the facility). Classic search returns multiple answers, ordered in the way the search algorithm thinks is most relevant to the query. Search results can go to many pages. A Chatbot returns one or more answers (but often one), and often more than one answer is returned when the question asks for multiple options. Both approaches are offered by today’s search, but they involve different things for search engine optimization (SEO).
Let’s take a quick example: I searched for “a good cauliflower pizza crust recipe” on Google. It returned about 25 different websites with recipes as well as directions to other related questions. The same question asked in ChatGPT returned a specific recipe in detail, with a message that I hope you enjoy my pizza.
From the consumer’s point of view, either could be better. If my goal was to find several recipes and do the work to select from them, the first one is better. If I only wanted one recipe, the second one is better. However, the entire structure of search engine optimization (SEO) is based on the first. If my business is focused on getting traffic from people looking for cauliflower crust recipes (and possibly selling them other things, like pre-made cauliflower crust), optimizing to rank higher in the first place is a goal SEO key. There are entire industries, best practices, tracking tools, etc. to help companies achieve this goal.
If customers decide to use the second approach, where does that leave these companies? ChatGPT chose a single recipe, with no indication of the source. A follow-up question about the source revealed that the answer was gathered from a lot of data that the AI had collected about recipes.
What does this mean for a business?
If your goal is to be found in a search, it’s not clear how to get a tool like ChatGPT to return your website as a response. For Classic SEO: There are well-defined guidelines (inbound links, appropriate content, well-formed pages, etc.) that businesses can follow to get their pages to rank higher in searches for selected keywords. For those businesses that help others optimize for SEO: What would they optimize for ChatGPT? Many tools and resources have appeared explaining how to use ChatGPT to write SEO-optimized content (and whether that’s a good idea), but it’s all about using ChatGPT to make your website traditional search friendly, not to get a tool like ChatGPT to get your website back.
So what can you do?
It is too early to know for sure what can be done. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these models learn from massive repositories of information, so being known in so many places online can help the model identify your brand. However, until we have more knowledge or guidance from the producers of these models, it will remain a challenge. Tracking data on what fraction of queries and what types of queries switch to these approaches compared to traditional search can help businesses understand whether an ongoing investment in SEO is worth it over time.
Takeaway food
As the chat approach becomes more popular, it’s worth examining your company’s search marketing strategy and trying to understand how it fits into these trends. For example:
Has your strategy been to create pages that answer important questions (for example, on a blog) and use those search visits to drive people to your site? If so, what if a chat interface decides to answer the question on its own? On the other hand, if your goal is for people to find very specific content (like a cauliflower recipe class starting next month), they’re less likely to see interference from a chatbot.
Ultimately, we are at the beginning of this journey and time will tell how it develops. In the meantime, it’s worth monitoring your SEO stats and seeing if there’s a noticeable change as these technologies start to expand in volume.
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