Search in a Post-ChatGPT World

What a time to be alive.? It’s been more than a year since ChatGPT first launched on November 30, 2022. ?While artificial intelligence is hardly new, ChatGPT represented a massive leap forward in so-called generative AI, or AI capable of creating new content.?

Everybody from sci-fi aficionados to futurists to filmmakers have been waiting with bated breath for the advent of the technology that will take over the world.? While plenty can be written about how the sudden explosion of AI has impacted modern society generally, it’s worth taking some time to see how it has impacted the area of internet search.?

1. It represents the industry’s latest revolution.? Much like the U.S. Gulf Coast and hurricanes, internet search gets bodyslammed by some sort of major upheaval every three to five years.? Prior to this we had smartphones, social media and the Internet of Things, so the arrival of generative AI in the form of ChatGPT is simply the most recent named storm.? And if you don’t believe me, ask Sergey Brin and Larry Page.? The cofounders of Google, who had stepped away from day-to-day duties at the company, came back in late 2022 to run internal meetings on how to best respond.? If ChatGPT got the likes of Brin and Page off the bench and back in the game, that should give some sense of how big a threat this was and still is.

2. ChatGPT unquestionably got first-mover advantage.? How long it can sustain that advantage is a separate question.? When ChatGPT first hit, there’s was simply nothing else like it.? A simple, stark, intuitive interface that would give customized, detailed responses to nearly any query was so novel, and the market followed suit: the site racked up 100 million users within two months of launch.? For the sake of context, it took TikTok nine months and Instagram nearly two and a half years to hit that number of users.?

But just twelve months in, at least some of the shine has worn off.? Google is refining Bard, directory site Yext was in the middle of tweaking its own AI bot early in 2023, and these days it seems like sites big and small are rolling out their own AI solutions.? And unlike Bard, the entry-level flavor of ChatGPT is still stuck on its corpus of internet documents from January 2022.? C’mon, guys, get with the program.

3. The search engine marketing community immediately freaked out, and seems to have remained in a state of low-grade mania ever since.? I attended Pubcon in Austin in late February 2023, some 90 days after the launch of ChatGPT.? At literally every session I attended, whether it was for SEO or SEM, the speaker included some mention of how ChatGPT could be employed to do things more effectively.? Naturally this was at the behest of Pubcon’s organizers, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that ChatGPT was the talk of the conference for all attendees, and still commands a tremendous level of mindshare for anybody involved in the industry.?

4. ChatGPT caught Google way off balance, but it was – and remains – foolish to count the search giant out of the fight.? While Google has a history of preparing pretty successfully for other market disruptions, such as the rise of the smartphone (it acquired Android in 2005), it seemed like Google got as sucker punched as the rest of us when ChatGPT exploded in November 2022.?

But it was folly to argue that Google had somehow ignored AI, for the simple reason that it had been experimenting with artificial intelligence for years leading up to November 2022.? Google had been steadily building AI capabilities into products like Google Assistant.? And one of Google’s biggest search algorithm updates in the last several years, RankBrain, is fundamentally an AI/ML technology. ?So it’s not as if Google had been unaware of the existence, much less the possibilities, of artificial intelligence.?

No, Google’s real mistake had been pursuing AI too tepidly; for a variety of reasons, the search giant was reluctant to take the generative route until ChatGPT forced its hand.? But now Google has been executing on its own generative AI strategy, and the results are compelling, particularly as it incorporates AI capabilities into its flagship search product.? That product, Search Generative Experience, is still in beta, but when it’s unveiled – probably sometime later in 2024 – organic rankings will undergo a profound shift.? ChatGPT may have gotten the jump on Google, but only a fool would say that the race is over.

5. Bing got interesting, even if it didn’t really get much traction against Google.? At a digital marketing conference some years ago, Moz founder Rand Fishkin remarked that whatever the so-called Google-killer is will look nothing like Google.? Well, in case you haven’t looked at Bing lately, Microsoft’s search product looks rather different from Google these days.? Incorporating ChatGPT’s functionality into its search results has done a lot to vault Bing from an also-ran to looking like a genuine alternative to Google.?

Has the Microsoft/ChatGPT alliance translated into increased search engine market share?? Sadly, probably not.? To repeat what I’ve said elsewhere: it’s going to take more than a quality search product to win market share from Google.? But props to Microsoft for not just making a solid search product, but something genuinely different.?

6. User behavior has unquestionably evolved, and that evolution seems both permanent and mixed.? One of the most fundamental things that ChatGPT seems to be doing is modifying search user behavior, particularly in terms of the types of subjects being searched and, especially, the forms that queries are increasingly taking.? As SEO pioneer Bruce Clay has pointed out, queries are increasingly taking the form of actual questions, not simply individual subjects or even long-tail search strings.?

However, users’ shifting behavior is worrying in at least one way: a severe trust deficit with respect to nearly any online content a user may find.? In a world where machines can create clear, concise content on par with what a human can produce, how do you know if the pixels you’re consuming were created by a person or a machine?? And if you can’t trust that you’re engaging with a human, how willing are you going to be to engage with that site at all??

One year in, ChatGPT has fundamentally changed the trajectory of some of the biggest companies in the tech industry.? And the latest revolution has yet to really come to an end.? It’s hard to not be at least curious as to how the landscape will look when the storm has passed.