ChatGPT Search: An element of your SEO or something to optimise separately

This move is uncharted territory for the SEO community, as ChatGPT's search engine uses an entirely different algorithm to Google's to determine what gets ranked. Early observations show that it's giving more weight to pages with affiliate content compared to Google's current search engine. It's also factoring in your past interactions—essentially using your previous queries to provide more contextually relevant answers. In some cases, ChatGPT delivers results that differ from those of both Google and Bing, so it's vital to stay ahead of these changes.

Currently, there are several categories that ChatGPT search has up-to-date information on; these include:

• Weather
• Stocks
• Sports
• News
• Maps

You can expect an expansion of categories as more people use the functionality.

ChatGPT is already an essential tool in many people's daily lives, whether for work, learning, or personal use. It's becoming the first place people turn to for answers. As ChatGPT's search function evolves and provides the answers users trust, more users will likely stick to this platform for their searches, just as most people don't switch between Google for their calendar and Outlook for email. While the search function is still in beta, more users can now use the functionality. 

The change in user behaviour means it's increasingly crucial for brands to ensure their visibility on ChatGPT's search engine. If your content isn't showing up where people are looking, you could miss out on potential traffic.

ChatGPT already has an impressive user base. As of August 2024, it boasts over 200 million weekly active users, with around 23% of the UK population using it at some stage. Even more significant is that 92% of Fortune 500 companies utilise OpenAI's products, including ChatGPT, signalling strong corporate adoption. ChatGPT can do things Google can't, and its growing army of users enjoy the experience.

As of October 2024, ChatGPT had around 10 million paying subscribers to its Plus plan, representing about 5% of its active user base. Additionally, over one million businesses use ChatGPT Enterprise, making this platform a significant player for individuals and companies.

As the functionality is limited to its paid user base, we will likely see the same user trend on its new Search platform, which is primarily people in working environments. This trend represents a potential B2B opportunity.

Recent reports suggest that ChatGPT Search is linked to Bing Search, meaning that pages removed from Bing's index aren't appearing in ChatGPT Search either. While this connection indicates that ChatGPT may be using Bing's index, it doesn't necessarily mean they use the same algorithm to rank results.

This new search engine generates bespoke results for the conversation it is part of. Extracting helpful information around search terms driving clicks may be complex. An example of this is one we conducted this morning. We initially looked for 'Nike trainers' and then refined it with the term 'women's shoe' and again with 'red ones' as we refined the search criteria.

This line of questioning did drive a click from us in our test case, but the question becomes, 'What gets reported as the click-driving term?' The final query, 'red ones,' would be useless to any search marketer, implying that strategies should be much more holistic than previous approaches, focusing on website health and content styles that appear highly well on the platform.

As we see more results from ChatGPT Search, it becomes apparent that content appears in the results that would not rank well in Google. In Google's last Core Algorithm update, we saw a drop in the visibility of affiliate pages, but this content is currently performing well on ChatGPT's platform. How long that lasts for is (of course) anyone's guess.

This challenge effectively means that marketers and SEOs may need to decide which platform to target when creating content. We predict that depending on user counts, we may see some brands with greater resources creating content for both as separate pages in different subfolders—potentially taking steps to prevent duplicate content by blocking specific crawlers from accessing the 'incorrect' page using their robots.txt file.