Originally titled, “Everything an SEO should know about SearchGPT by OpenAI”, this LinkedIn post by digital marketing agency Go Fish Digital is required reading as it points to the direction search is moving in. Publishers take note. The full original blog post written by Dan Hinckley can be read here.
On July 25th, OpenAI announced that they were entering the search engine market with a new product called SearchGPT. The launch of the new search engine is limited to an initial set of users and that they were going to be sending out invites in the near future. Go Fish Digital was lucky enough to be select for this initial alpha version of their new search engine.
What is SearchGPT? SearchGPT is a cutting-edge search engine developed by OpenAI. It’s important to note that SearchGPT is not an LLM that can search, like traditional ChatGPT, but a search engine that leverages LLM technology. It includes search results and while you can enter long search queries and can ask follow-up questions or searches, it does not respond like a chatbot.
This week, my colleague Dan Hinckley received early access to SearchGPT. Our team has been able to test and use it and run sample searches through it to analyze the results. We tested quite a few searches including ones from informational, commerce, local queries and more.
Here are some of the top takeaways so far:
1. SearchGPT uses an extremely simple interface. There’s three columns (navigational, links, information). You get more of the key information in the above the fold content.
2. For now, there are no ads. Entering a prompt gives you the answer directly in the interface. Of course, that’s likely to change but for now, it’s an ad-free experience.
3. It’s much more friendly at giving citations than Google’s AI Overviews. The left-hand sidebar will always generate external citations. It’s also extremely common to see 5+ citations in the content itself. There are many searches where 1-2 citations completely dominate the results.
4. Affiliate & aggregator sites are going to dominate in terms of AI-powered search. When searching software & commerce queries, the search engine pulls from listicle articles, not individual products or landing pages. Getting your site included on these lists is going to be more important than ever.
5. SearchGPT will localize results similar to Google. When typing in something like “restaurants near me”, you’ll see results in your area without having to define a location.
6. SearchGPT seems to be much better at giving correct answers and avoiding hallucinations than Google’s AI Overviews. We tested searching queries that tricked Google before, SearchGPT gives the correct answer.
7. It’s interesting that you can perform advanced search operators with SearchGPT. Performing a “site:” search will give you results from only a single source.
[8 – Editor’s addition: SearchGPT offers a Chrome extension that allows users to set it as their default search engine. However, Google prompts users to change back to its search engine upon performing their first search.]
Those are the biggest insights we have so far but I’m sure there’s much more to come. It will be interesting to see how more and more SEOs and users start to adapt and use the technology.
We might very well see SearchGPT become a legitimate threat to Google in the not so long term.
Chris Long
VP of Marketing, Go Fish Digital
Go Fish Digital is an award-winning digital marketing agency with specialties in SEO, link building, PPC/SEM advertising, website design and ORM. Go Fish Digital continues to provide thought leadership in the areas of search engine optimization and digital SaaS products for the online marketing industry.
