ChatGPT rolls out a new Search feature: Why should you care?

Digital Marketing

ChatGPT has rolled out a brand new feature: Search. 

So what? 

It’s just another new piece of tech. You’re a busy marketer or business owner and don’t have the time to keep up with all the latest trends online. So, why should you care about SearchGPT? 

Here are two reasons:

1. We have already seen traffic arrive on our clients’ websites from ChatGPT.
2. We have already seen goal completions (key actions you want users to take on your website) occur from users who have arrived on some of our clients’ websites from ChatGPT. 

It might be that your target audience, too, is starting to use ChatGPT to discover brands like yours. Ensuring your website is optimised for ChatGPT Search might lead to more traffic and maybe even goal completions… and maybe even leads!

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that uses machine learning to generate responses to queries and prompts (prompts are effectively instructions that you type into the interface). You can tell to do a huge variety of things, such as:

• Write blog articles,
• Write poems,
• Discover and correct the errors in a piece of computer code,
• Translate languages.

Using some of the additional features available (called GPTs) you can go so far as to create things like 

• Diagrams,
• Imagery,
• Colouring book pages,
• Videos,

…and instruct it to do things like:

• Teach you to become a better advocate for yourself,
• Explain board games,
• Troubleshoot a device you’re struggling to use. 

It is incredibly powerful and draws on the information already available on the internet to create new content and complete complex tasks. 

What is SearchGPT?

Search is a new feature that has been integrated into ChatGPT. This feature isn’t available to everyone at the moment, but OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) say that eventually, every user will have access to it. 

The feature allows a user to search the web in real time from within ChatGPT. The results merge an AI-generated written response to the query, with links to pertinent websites and even maps for local searches. The result is a highly personalised search result, and users can ask follow-up questions that allow them to delve deeper. 

Here’s what a company search can look like. I used the query “non destructive testing companies”.

Search results are displayed automatically if it is relevant to the query typed in, or triggered manually using a dedicated search icon.

Refreshingly, ChatGPT Search allows multiple citation opportunities for a single query. Multiple pages from the same domain can be referenced in a single response. 

This means that there are ample opportunities for websites to be featured within the results. Plenty of opportunities for your website to be discovered.

How does ChatGPT collate its results?

OpenAI and Microsoft have a very close working relationship, so it comes as no surprise that ChatGPT draws on Bing’s index to help it provide Search results. OpenAI’s VP of Engineering is known to have said, “We use a set of services, and Bing is an important one.”

So, if you’re ranking within Bing, you are far more likely to be cited by ChatGPT. 

ChatGPT ranks content independently, so results won’t look quite the same as Bing’s. Ensuring you’re ranking well on Bing is a good starting point though. 

How important is ChatGPT Search going to become?

At the moment, who knows? Currently, the majority of searches in the world happen on Google, with Bing taking second place.

ChatGPT’s usage certainly saw massive growth until April 2024, hitting an all-time high of 1.8 billion in mid-2023 and mid-2024. There was a decline in the number of visits from that point. You can see the traffic landing on ChatGPT in the chart below.

But, winning 132.8 million in September 2024 is certainly nothing to be sniffed at though! That’s a lot of users that may be utilising ChatGPT as a search engine once the feature is rolled out to all users.

Source: Simlarweb

It will interesting to see how traffic to ChatGPT will change as things develop.

Tips to help you appear in ChatGPT Search

If you’re anything like me, your heart might be sinking at the thought of another thing you need to optimise your website for. You already have so much on your plate! 

Thankfully, making sure you appear in ChatGPT is reasonably easy if you’re already following many of the best practices recommended by Google when it comes to content creation. 

As a starting point:

• Make sure your website’s robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot.
• As ChatGPT draws on Bing’s index, make sure you have submitted a sitemap to Bing via Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Make sure you have a clear site architecture. 
• Check that Bing has indexed your critical pages. 

Best practices for writing content that pleases ChatGPT

When it comes to writing content itself, a lot of the advice that has been given for optimising for Google AI Overviews is relevant – use precise language, write simple sentences and make sure all the content you write has a very clear structure (no big walls of text). 

But, in addition, ChatGPT likes the most up-to-date information, so keep content fresh. 

Schedule in time to go through your blogs every couple of months. Think about:

• Do you still agree with the opinion that you’ve shared in your blog post? Have you changed your mind? Why? This doesn’t just please ChatGPT, but search engines too – sharing your experience and expertise can set you apart from those who are just churning out AI-generated content. 
• Whether the statistics are still up-to-date. If you’ve referenced stats from elsewhere, double-check to see whether there are any new data. 
• Whether you can add anything else that is relevant. 
• Whether you can enrich the content by adding original photography, graphics or video. 
• Are you missing any content opportunities? Creating new content that answers your target audience’s frequently asked questions not only allows ChatGPT to give more thorough answers but is great from a user experience standpoint. 

Best practices for your technical optimisation. 

If you have already spent time making sure your website is built to please search engines, then the AI bots are going to love it too. 

Make sure:

• To use structured data and schema markup. 
• Your website’s metadata is completed properly. 

This gives AI bots (and search engines) everything they need to understand the content on your website. 

Not sure about all this optimisation malarky?

If all this sounds a bit technical, then don’t worry, we can help. We can provide a range of services that can help you ensure you don’t miss out on any opportunities that this new era or Search affords. 

• Need to check whether your website is optimised for ChatGPT or Search in general? Then a website audit can uncover the state of your website’s onsite, offsite, and technical SEO.
• Need a little bit of support or want someone to just bounce ideas with? Then our flexible consultation service might be just the ticket.
• Feeling a bit overwhelmed with the workload? Then our content writing services might be helpful. 

… and we also rebuild websites!

ChatGPT Search: Could it be a source of new enquiries for your business?

There’s no telling whether ChatGPT Search will take off. Whilst it’s clear that ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool and is very popular with businesses and users alike, its future as a search engine is yet to be seen.

Will users default to ChatGPT over Google if their primary aim is to search for a business? Probably not.

But there’s no doubt that business websites will be surfaced by many prompts utilised by users.

For myself, I’m very tempted to add the Chrome extension to my browser so that I can search via ChatGPT. But, that’s because I’m feeling rebellious and don’t enjoy the monopoly that Google has in the world of Search. 

There’s no denying that there will be some traffic that lands on some websites from ChatGPT, and it may be that some of this traffic turns into leads. So, make sure you’re doing everything you can to help ChatGPT understand your website needs to be on your to-do list for next year.