What are the Immediate Impacts of ChatGPT on Search?

The most significant immediate impact of OpenAI’s products will live outside of search, where the AI is effectively aiding the user as an assistant. Rather than simply fulfilling a search need, it's about helping the user spark new thinking and ideas. It’s more about?doing?and?prompting?versus?answering. OpenAI will be more helpful as an assistant completing tasks and generating useful ideas and prompts. In the short term, it won’t be as valuable for replacing the vast majority of behaviors that begin on a search engine.

The immediate impacts from ChatGPT (or any generative machine learning model, for that matter) include:

1)?A shift in market share:?If Microsoft capitalizes on the moment, they could gain a select segment of searchers. There could be an overall reduction in searches on Google if users start turning to Bing or leveraging inline within Microsoft suite products for certain need states, which could lead to a decline in Google’s ad revenue.

2) Speedier content creation:?Marketers can leverage ChatGPT to ‘jumpstart’ routine SEM tasks such as creating ad copy, generating new keyword ideas, and writing Google Ads scripts.

For SEO, this tool can help writers with content – a critical area for connecting with users in a meaningful, indexable way. It can help clarify a brief and present a quick, terse proposal that is a coherent jumping off point for content writers. Ideally, this tool is going to help major companies shorten their draft time significantly. Editing, validating, and refining content will become an even more critical skillset.

That said, it’s important to note that?copying and pasting from ChatGPT?would be considered spam or black hat, and would open brands to manual penalty. It also runs the risk of plagiarism for writers across the web and the AI content itself (colloquially called AIagiarism). Generative models are also prone to misinformation and biases. So,?using as a tool and not a source is critical.

3) More conversational search:?Improvements in machine learning offer a deeper potential for search being more conversational. Ask ChatGPT advice and it returns a generic response. Sure, it makes up information sometimes and it may perfectly reflect an expert’s response, but it offers coherence. We’re so excited to see how Bing will use ChatGPT. We’re hopeful they’ll enhance ChatGPT to include suggested source references and links to websites.

4) Increased Importance of E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust are cornerstones of Google’s quality rating guidelines for SEO. These are the pillars of what makes Google the top search engine. ChatGPT?is not at a point where it can validate information?or constantly retrain against incoming information concurrently (it can’t process current events at the speed at which they’re generated). This means that search engines will likely double down on their key advantages.

5) Structured Data Enhancements:?There will likely be some form of structured data to support engines leveraging generational models with enabling features, updating data faster, and validating information.