Search Engine Marketing | Marketing | Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI introduced the new ChatGPT Search, showing the future of how we will find information. This development is good news for content creators because now the sources of information that makes up a ChatGPT natural language prompt response are displayed.
“ChatGPT Plus and Team users as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, will have access today,” OpenAI says of the new service. “Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the next few weeks. We’ll roll out to all Free users over the coming months.”
If you have availability, go to ChatGPT 4o and you will see a “globe” icon in the context window. Click that, enter a prompt and you can now search. The hybrid results display a several paragraph answer together with links to where the answer was derived from.
Welcome to the future of search
The first prompt I ran with the new tool was, “what is the difference between autobiography and memoir?”
The results were just what I was looking for. I could see the trustworthy sources that went into generating the result.
While I didn’t need to click links to get more information, they were there in case I wanted to.
For most of this year, I had been using Perplexity.ai, a cool hybrid between a LLM chatbot and a traditional blue link search engine. Now ChatGPT offers a similar approach, displaying answers to natural language queries by showing a text answer together with links for more information.
Many marketers worried that chatbots will disrupt search. While search is obviously changing with AI engines, valuable content is still surfaced. A focus on creating valuable content is still worthwhile in a world of AI search.
OpenAI says: “We collaborated extensively with the news industry and carefully listened to feedback from our global publisher partners, including Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El País), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time, and Vox Media. Any website or publisher can choose to appear in ChatGPT search.”
