Is ChatGPT Relying on Google and Shopify for Answers? #SEOFOMO TL;DR July 14, 2025

The latest in SEO news with today's SEO FOMO, Too Long, Didn't Read. And in today's edition, I am here with the wonderful Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy and Research at Answerive. Hello, Lily. How are you?

I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you very much for joining me. Before starting, I want to thank our today's sponsor, Similarweb. Thank you very much for your sponsorship. And the first new is the really insightful study from Alexis Rilko, who researched the correlation of ChatGPT search with Google search results, identifying that it seems that pretty much ChatGPT at this point has moved away on relying on Bing, and he pretty much validated on the results that he got in ChatGPT answers with the ones of the SERPs in Bing on one hand versus the ones in Google. And the images are pretty much self-descriptive here. There's a very high correlations with the ones from Google, not necessarily that much with the ones of Bing on one hand. Then on the other hand, yeah, the snippets are very, very similar to ones in the Google SERPs, not necessarily as similar with the ones of Bing. Also the inclusion of the SRS LTD parameter in ChatGPT answers, which we know is a parameter that Google uses to track product from the Merchant Center. So many, many scenarios, a lot of coincidence, quote unquote, showcasing how it's relying more in a way that they haven't necessarily disclosed or announced ever Google's data. It's interesting to see definitely after A few months ago, Google put in place additional methods, let's say, to make it harder to scrape the results as well, their SERPs too. And Manny mentioned that this was aimed to LLMs.

I mean, first of all, I thought this was an excellent article and thank you to Alexis for putting this together because it seems like it was a lot of work. I shared a few months ago that I discovered that same Merchant Center parameter in URLs that has been kind of causing problems for a lot of SEO clients. You know, you can like visit those links directly from Google's organic results and it still carries over that parameter, that SRS-LTID parameter. I saw those also appearing in ChatGPT a few months ago. So I thought this was a really interesting article because that for me was, that was the first clue that ChatGPT might be using Google Search, maybe in addition to Bing or instead of Bing. But this article really kind of Provides a lot of very convincing evidence that ChatGPT is indeed using Google, which has a lot of implications for AI search. I mean, number one, you know, there's a whole debate about whether or not fundamental SEO approaches are still important for AI search. And obviously if ChatGPT is relying on Google, there's a lot of crossover there. You need to make sure that you're very visible in Google as well. But I do think it's really kind of interesting and curious, like How this might be set up. You know, how is OpenAI able to do this? Like, you would think that they would have to have Google's permission, right? Or like a partnership with Google. And Alexis points out here that we don't, we don't know that that actually happened. They haven't made that public. But I think that's interesting. Maybe that happened behind closed doors and we just don't know about it. Or maybe they're using Google in a way that's against their terms of service. Like, it's hard to say, but I'm not surprised because I think that We'll talk about this in another article, but I think that there's a lot of issues that OpenAI is running into with surfacing high-quality content. And obviously Google has 25 years of history and work that it's done to surface really trustworthy content. So it doesn't surprise me that OpenAI would want to leverage their results.

It's funny because we love to complain about Google SERPs because there's always room for improvement. But realistically, now that there are new platforms crawling the web out there and trying to apply some quality filters, then it shows that Google has much more experience than these other players. Also in another scenario, in crawlability and indexability, the lack of support, for example, on client-side rendered JavaScript by OpenAI, ChatGPT, and other LLMs. It's very weird that in any case, we haven't heard of any confirmation and it will be weird. Actually that Google will want to do any sort of collaboration with ChatGPT or OpenAI because they are pretty much at this point their biggest threat in AI search. This ties well with the next top topic, which is the documentation that I found in OpenAI mentioning Shopify as one of their third-party search providers along with Bing. Since the release of their enhanced shopping experience with product carousels, that in their documentation, they mentioned how they don't even at this point reorganize or re-rank on any case. They just pretty much rely on the feeds and metadata their third-party collaborators, partners provide. There have been all of these discussions and people wondering who are these collaborators or third party, because They hadn't disclosed who they were, but quietly in the background, I went and checked that since May 15th, they actually updated their documentation where we can see that Shopify was added as a third-party service provider, which I have to say makes complete sense. But I'm wondering why they haven't disclosed this so far, at least like with an official announcement as it is expected in this sort. I think that's a great point.

And I love that you found that in their documentation because as you mentioned, it's kind of like a quiet addition to the article that they already had. And I think for me, that has a lot of implications as far as like what we can maybe expect as far as OpenAI's communications with the public about when they're changing certain things. You know, I think like with Google for many years, we're very used to them having search liaisons and people that communicate when they make changes that affect website owners and e-commerce websites and things like this. And with ChatGPT, of course it's in the documentation, but it's not really something that they're going out there and telling everybody, you know, now we're using Shopify or whatever it is. So we're going to have to pay very close attention to their documentation and the changes that they make. And I think it's so great to see so many people in this space, like the SEO space, like looking through the code and looking through the Chrome Inspector and everything and kind of finding these nuggets. Because we're going to have to keep kind of working together to understand the changes that they're making. But of course it makes a lot of sense with Shopify. You know, that's such a huge percentage of e-commerce websites on the internet. Makes a lot of sense that OpenAI would want to work directly with them. And I think that's great news because there's so many e-commerce websites that are on Shopify.

Indeed. When Shopify released their announcement of their new enhanced shopping experience, they also released this form to open up to more partnerships. I imagine that this is just the beginning. Very looking forward to see in the future who else they collaborate and partner with. And hopefully there's a straightforward way in the future for e-commerce, for online stores to have a sort of search console to do it in an automatic way. Then next article is the guide, which I am very happy and thankful to James Brockbank, giving awareness of a very, very important issue that I know, Lily, you have also highlighted in the past, spam in ChatGPT answers, right? And we're not talking here of the typical parasite SEO type of tactic of creating a few posts in LinkedIn or major social platforms in order to showcase the top 10, whatever product services. There have been many also doing this to show how easy to manipulate ChatGPT was with SEOs, top SEOs, but this is about hacked websites and expired domains being used as sources in ChatGPT recommendations. And this is funny because there's this group of SEOs highlighting that with AI search, there's this opportunity for us as a sector to rebrand ourselves in a better way because unfortunately, The SEO industry still has a bad reputation in certain sectors. Here's a little bit of a counterargument. Unfortunately, with any new platform that is still not as sophisticated, we will have this wave of some group of people trying to manipulate it, trying to leverage it, even if in the long run it is understood that it won't work anymore and we sort of end up having this type of scenarios. And again, it makes a great point on what you were mentioning before, Lily, about how it feels rather a primitive problem.

Yeah, definitely. I loved this article. I thought that it highlighted a really big problem. Definitely a similar problem to what I'm starting to see in a lot of the data that I'm looking at. And I also think it kind of ties it back into what we talked about before with ChatGPT using Google's results, because I think one of the reasons why they be leaning so heavily into Google's results is to try to mitigate this problem of sourcing a lot of spammy content because Google's algorithms are already doing the work of cleaning out this spam, right? So if you lean on Google, you're less likely to pull in spammy results as citations. But, you know, maybe for the searches where OpenAI is not using the internet, we're going to see it's citing different sources and its training data or whatever that kind of haven't been cleaned out because they're spammy websites because OpenAI maybe doesn't have the same type of Algorithms or spam filters to kind of clean out those websites. And I'm not surprised people are taking advantage of this while they can. You know, I think that that's to be expected. It's the same thing that happened with Google Search and SEO many, many times. Whenever people find opportunities, they exploit them and it works for a short period. But I think we can reasonably expect that large language models will get better and more sophisticated over time. And what I've been kind of saying about this is like, listen, it's the same thing with SEO. If you're willing to take the risk, if you're willing to lose everything and make a lot of money for a short period, you know, you can try these tactics, but they're probably not gonna work very well. But if you're a brand that cares about the longevity of the website and you wanna make sure you're doing things right, you probably don't wanna experiment with these types of tactics because what I think will probably happen is like OpenAI and these other large language models will probably just like learn how to exclude sites from the training data or learn how to exclude sites from being referenced. And you don't want to be excluded in the future. I also noticed, I am looking at some citations in Profound as well. There's sites in the list of the most heavily cited websites on ChatGPT that would never rank in Google search. You know, and you can look at like their profile on Ahrefs and you can see how much organic traffic these pages are driving, you know, how much visibility they have in Google search and it's zero, right? They're spam websites. So I think it's definitely going to be a big problem for OpenAI and the other large language models because Again, Google has 25 years of figuring this problem out and they're kind of starting from scratch. But I do think there's going to be a lot of people trying to manipulate LLM answers with very spammy content. And so far we even see like white text on a white background is working. So it's like, we're back to SEO from 1995.

100%. 100%. I will expect that someone from OpenAI/ChatGPT are paying attention and indeed it also shows the importance of having a search liaison or that type of role with the community from these platforms, gathering feedback, getting this sort of information to improve accordingly. The next resource that I will like to highlight is a resource that I actually launched last week aligned with this to help people out there to get reliable, balanced information regarding AI search optimization. There's so much noise, also like extreme takes in a way that is actually not helpful for the community, right? And I believe that we'd like to give a little bit back by highlighting the actual best content out there, the reliable content that many SEOs who have a lot of experience have been sharing about these topics that people can use accordingly to start learning and taking this journey Altogether. I believe that all of us are in our learning process. Indeed, I also believe that there are no one better out there than SEOs with experience to develop or evolve their skills further to also do this as well, even with different tweaks that is obviously necessary for AI search platforms. So yes, hopefully with this resource, it will be facilitated. I have also enabled this form so anybody out there can submit the resource and it will be reviewed weekly to update the website accordingly. The other group of most popular articles is unsurprisingly the latest news about the June 2025 core update. We're pretty much on the second week so far at this point. I will expect that we still have about a week to finish. The update, which is usually a little bit longer than the couple of weeks that they tend to. In this coverage by Barry Schwartz, he goes through all of the shirts, the comments from Glengabe. Lily, you have also shared as well, have you seen some websites that had increased or decreased in past core updates and from the HCU also with partial recoveries? So far, I also went directly myself yesterday and share a few insights here from different verticals where I have clients and something that in particular took my attention. And I don't know if you have seen this in the data that you have already been monitoring, Lily, is for some of the biggest platforms or most authoritative platforms, some shifts that Google had done in the past. So if you remember, it was HubSpot that lost quite a bit of visibility for queries that they were ranking with some blog posts that were not necessarily on topic, right? Like about emoji or motivational quotes or passive income ideas or how to make money online or so on. And I can see that all the big platforms out there, like Shopify in this case, have had a very important increase here with this sort of off-topic type of queries for which I wouldn't necessarily consider them to be a big authority in this particular field. We see others like Bankrate, for example, of course, Reddit is still there, YouTube videos and so on. A lot of UGC. But yes, it took my attention that it's changing, but not necessarily in a way that I would have necessarily expected. Also something that I saw in some reviews publications. Especially those that endorse products where I am paying more attention for the e-commerce sector, is that some publications like Tom's Hardware, for example, they have lost quite a bit of visibility with the typical blog posts or subcategories for which they were ranking for terms like best gaming laptops, for example. However, they have regained some sort of visibility as although not as much with forum entries, threads, which surprise, surprise ties coincidentally or not well together the release, the announcement that Google gave last week also about adding a filter in the Google Search Console in order to be able to monitor better the forum-related rich results from the SERPs. This shouldn't be necessarily surprising that Google continue to push a little bit even further this type of UGC platforms, real experience that people want to see in, in the SERPs?

Yeah, well, as you mentioned, it's still early. You know, I think you mentioned we're on week 2 out of 3, so things can still change. I've learned my lesson about analyzing core updates a little bit too early because sometimes things can change at the last minute. So it's important to kind of have that disclaimer. But I think the most interesting thing to me so far is that, you know, for almost 2 years, Google has been saying that they're working on making a change to whatever they implemented with the September 2023 helpful content update that really suppressed thousands and thousands of websites. And some of those websites are starting to see pretty meaningful, not full recoveries, but they're seeing upward trends in traffic starting with this core update. And Google did say numerous times over the last couple of years that they're going to make changes to help some of these sites recoveries again. So this might be, you know, the implementation of some of those changes that Google's making, which is very late. You know, it's, it's a lot of these sites have really struggled for the past year or 2. So I don't know how much this really helps at this point, but anything helps. I think it's also good that Google's putting its money where its mouth is as far as like potentially helping small publishers and making some changes that can elevate small publishers. So I've been kind of surprised to see Some of the sites turning around. Like, I just found a site this morning that's a travel blog that really was affected very negatively by the March core update in 2024, and they're seeing a really meaningful recovery with this update. So that's kind of what I've been paying attention to. I haven't dug into the, the bigger impacts yet, but you know what you pointed out with forums and UGC, I think that's been a really big trend over the last couple years with core updates. I think what Google is doing is it recognizes that users want more authentic, real human contributions for a lot of queries. Like you pointed out with Tom's Hardware, some of those are like best product queries. I think Google likes to show real conversations from real people as opposed to like just a bunch of affiliate websites, because I think a lot of people complain when they go to Google, they feel like everything they're reading is just like SEO spam, right? And they wanna see what real people are saying. So I think actually for the past year or two, like Forums are really kind of an underrated SEO strategy, even though we've, we talked about them 20 years ago. You know, people are all building forums, but I think again, both Google as well as large language models really seem to be using a lot of forum answers in their results. So I'm not surprised to see that Google's rewarding some forums and also giving us discussions and forums as a filter in Search Console because they, I think they want more of that type of content. I think it also helps them with their AI search as well.

100%. So I love that you mentioned AI search and LLMs in here. Coincidentally, one of the type of customers that I have seen that are performing very, very well in LLMs are those that have communities and indexable communities. I want to highlight, unfortunately, there are so many websites and brands that rely on Discords and these platforms that unfortunately are the so-called dark forest, but I have a couple of SaaS clients that actually they have their forums. They have done a great job integrating the user experience and leveraging conversations in order to create help articles and engage with their community, getting feedback, used as help centers as well. And all of those citations and comments, not only in their own website, but also in third parties. I have SaaS clients that have DevRel, engaging with YouTubers, for example, in the tech space and all of these platforms that are indexable. And then you see answers citing these sort of conversations. Also in Reddit, speaking of Reddit, there are actual conversations and you can see community managers disclosing they are community managers, by the way, helping the community out there, not only in their own websites, but also in third-party platforms and It's paying off and you can do it in a good way. I think I want to highlight this very well because it shows how good SEO is aligned with good PR, good community management, good social media too. And we already knew this for traditional SEO, quote unquote, but I think that if there's something that we need to piggyback a little bit on the interest on AI, this big hype that there is, is this.

Yeah. I think now we have like Google showcasing more Instagram content as well. That's been a new change. I also see Threads.

Mm-hmm.

Is really picking up steam. It's getting a lot more traffic from Google search with this algorithm update. So I think that's a trend that's been true for the last couple of years, but it's becoming more and more true, which is that these platforms want user-generated content. They want real human conversations, social posts, and they seem to be like accessing these websites and crawling these websites very frequently. So you can do a lot to influence AI answers just by contributing authentic content to different social media platforms and forums. Indeed.

Thank you very much for highlighting that, that Instagram is going to allow Google to index all of their posts unless they are private. So we're looking forward to see about the impact of that in the SERPs. To start wrapping up, I want to thank again Similarweb, who coincidentally speaking about AI traffic, the importance of citations, conversations, and so on, have their own AI traffic report. If you haven't taken a look yet, Go and check it out. This is a time to start better understanding the behavior of the audience from AI search platforms indeed. And if you want to keep up with the latest news without waiting for the next edition of the SEO FOMO newsletter, go and take a look at the SEO FOMO News where you can also submit your own resources and upvote those news that you have the biggest interest about. And I want to thank again Lily. Lily, thank you. Thank you for joining again and your insights and commentary and tips. I really appreciate it. I'm very looking forward to see next week when the Core Update finally finishes. If you want to finish today's episode with a last tip, last comment that you wish to share with the audience.

Well, thank you again for having me. It's always a pleasure. Last tip, I think I've been kind of talking a lot in my recent talks, and I know like Will Reynolds also does a great job talking about this, but Being authentic and having your brand be as authentic as possible right now, I think, is going to be very important. I think there's a lot of shortcuts people are taking to try to manipulate large language models. I saw like an ad on Instagram where somebody just copy-pasted all the AI overview answer and put that in their blog to try to make that, you know, the answer that appears in AI overviews. And I think users can kind of catch on to these tactics. A lot of times users can read the content and feel like this is AI-generated, it's not very authentic. And I think the brands that choose to be authentic and use their own voice and their own expert knowledge written by real humans, I think those are the ones that are going to win out over time. So if you care about the long-term health of your brand, focus on authenticity and not taking shortcuts.

That is an amazing last tip indeed. Thank you. Thank you, Lily. I really appreciate it. And thank you for watching. If you have liked today's episode. Remember to like it, to subscribe to the channel to avoid missing out. Until the next edition, bye-bye. Bye.