ChatGPT search is out. Here's everything you need to know

Chatgpt Search is finally out. It only took two years, but it is worth waiting for. This is probably going to be the best feature that OpenAI has launched since ChatGPT and the most disruptive for Google. I've been playing with it all morning. I'm going to give you the complete breakdown. I'm going to show you the comparison of Search and ChatGPT Search versus Google, tell you why ChatGPT Search is better, show you some examples of where Google still might be better keep, give you the weaknesses of Chat GPT Search today and tell you all what it means for your precious organic traffic. Let's get into today's show. ChatGPT search is finally here and I couldn't be more excited. So two years ago we did our first ever episode around ChatGPT, November 2022. And if you go all the way back, one of the things I said on that very first episode, and maybe Darren, producer extraordinaire, can actually go find the clip and I said, this is going to be disruptive for search. Why do we think that AI is disruptive to Google? Well, one of the big reasons I think it's disruptive to Google is because you can build yourself a much more personalized search engine. Fast forward the clock. We've had things like Perplexity, we've had some other search apps come out, but now we have OpenAI entering the fray and launching ChatGPT search. I'm going to give you the lowdown. I'm going to break down what was launched, the features of ChatGPT Search, give you some real examples and how those examples highlight how disruptive it is for the blue links, give you some of the limitations of ChatGPT search and give you a little bit of how I think about this in the future for all of us marketers who are dependent upon organic traffic. Okay, let's get into the one of the launch threads for many of the, you know, great AI thread makers out there. So ChatGPT search launched large last night. Obviously we need a little hyperbole, but I do believe it is going to completely change the game. I agree with this. And so one of the reasons why is because this is actually embedded within the Chat GPT feature itself. It's not a separate search engine. You don't have to go to like a perplexity and actually start to search through a different place. You can actually just go into ChatGPT and do all of your search from within there. Now, why is that A big deal? 3.1 billion people visited ChatGPT in September. That is a lot of people that you can actually start to onboard to this new way of searching. That is why I have always fascinated and interested about when OpenAI will enter this race. We have had Perplexity. I think they have like 10, 20 million users a month. But this ChatGPT is a Goliath. They have over 100 million users, they have billions of visitors each and every month. And Perplexity was actually built on ChatGPT. So the experience of ChatGPT search, saying ChatGPT a lot, is going to be very familiar for people who are using Perplexity. So let's get into some of the features you obviously now can get instant acts, instant answers, right? You can get up to date information, it's connected to the web, you can have all of your conversations in the same place. You don't need to go to a separate search engine. I cannot emphasize how big of a deal that is. OpenAI's core plan here, aside from AGI, which is the company's mission is really to have the all knowing, all doing personal assistant for B2C and a separate one for B2B. I think it's going to be a separate one, maybe not. And you can actually now do all of your search in the same place that you're using ChatGPT for a bunch of other things. It's available today for plus and team users. And so it's connected into things like the Wet the, the stock app and the weather app. Right. And it can give you all of that information within the same place. And the big thing we've been waiting for is well, how will they reference links? And again, if you've basically used Perplexity at all, this will feel somewhat familiar in that they have citations within the content itself. And if you click on this source link at the end of an answer, you can get all of the different web pages it has used to construct that answer on the right hand side. Now I, I want to jump into this very part because I think the thing you are all interested in and I have been interested in is like how badly does this cannibalize existing traffic that we all get if people gravitate towards AI search, which is fundamentally a better experience. Now the thing that we said on a previous podcast is Google really is the open web. Google is the last bastion of the open web. What do we mean by that? 64% of all referral traffic across the web comes from Google. That is why things like digital marketing have become so impactful, because we were Able to reach customers in a different way. We could create organic traffic by creating value and then extracting that value, those people from that platform and getting them to come to our website and then getting them to buy our products. Over the course of the past decade the web has become much more closed. We've had social media companies start to penalize you for adding links or promoting things organic posts on social do much better if you do not include any other links. For example on LinkedIn if you include a link in your post it gets 6x less the impressions or the actual traffic. Same thing for Twitter Twitter, same thing for Instagram. So Google has kind of been this last bastion of, of the open web but AI has fundamentally changed that and I want to give you an example of why this is going to happen now I'm a Liverpool supporter. You can see the sign Bobby Firmino Jersey in the background. The man, the myth, the legend still not have put it on the wall. It's been sitting there for three years. I am an obsessive person. I get obsessed by things and forget to do other things. I have another incredible painting here from an incredible artist that is like perfectly framed, looks amazing and I've been meaning to hang it on the back wall for the last year but that is just the kind of person I am. But I want to know how many points Liverpool have got in the new season. They're doing pretty well, have a brand new manager, it's all going great. So I asked Google hey like how many points does Liverpool have? And they give me some links that I can go and start to look over and probably get the answer right. I can click into this, I can get the answer after I click off all of the spam. And that is like the other thing that's kind of interesting about Google AI search is it you can get the answer without having to go to the website and get interact with all of these kind of click boxes to try to get you to do things right. If I when I go do this in the AI search it basically will give me the table everything I need without ever having to go to Google. Now again what's kind of cool here is you can click on these sources, click on this one here to get all of these things in the right hand panel. The only thing I would say is like why would I ever need to go there? It's giving me the perfect answer, I don't need to go to the website. And that's what I mean by this is a really impactful for the open web. Because why do I ever need to leave the platform to go look at your website if you're getting the answer here? But that's not the reason I think it's going to be. So I've always felt that it was going to be really disruptive for start. Sure, you get the answer here, but maybe there's some additional things that you need that you have to start to go and look at other information resources for. Well, it's really the speed of iteration. For me it's always been about the two things. The AI is an overlay on top of the blue links, right? You can actually, there's never been a better example of that than when you click on sources and you can see all of the blue links that it's used to construct the answer. So it's an assistant that sits on top of those blue links and gives you the perfect answer. But it's really the speed of iteration and the speed of follow up that I have thought is a just a fundamentally better experience than what we've had before. And this is a perfect example, right? I'm a, I'm a buyer of CRM tech and I go and say, hey, well, I start my query with something pretty simplistic. What is the best CRM for small businesses? And it gives some good answers here, of course, because it gives HubSpot first. It knows what it's talking about, gives the sources and then basically creates that list. Pretty standard. Nothing amazing to see here, but that's not where I'm going to end my research. Right. I'm actually interested in actually can you give me the same thing, but can you give me the pros and cons? Now how would I do this in a blue link world? I would get the initial list, then I would go look for pros and cons myself and then I would have to build the table myself. But you don't need to do that now. You have the AI that is an assistant on top of the search blue links for you. It can actually just construct that table and we'll get into the cons of AI because there are still some reliability and hallucinations of that. If some of you are screaming, especially the SEOs screaming at the screen and saying, yeah, but you can't trust this data. Okay, let's get to that in a little bit. But it constructs the table, does pros and cons and then I'm like, well, you know, I'm actually going to be a big business. I'm a small business today, but I'm A big business in the future. And I want to figure out what CRMs could actually scale. And so I ask it again for the small business and I ask it to segment by up business. And so again it gives some answers here and actually talks about the different ones. And I will say as part of the way I think About Search or ChatGPT Search today is it's also a great branding tool, actually a brand research tool. And I can get into that a little bit in a minute. But this is a good example of okay, well why do we not appear in this list, right? And I have some, I have some ideas around that. But the speed of iteration and follow up is really interesting here, right? It's really powerful. So you have an AI assistant that can do the initial search, but then you can actually just continue to like update and iterate your query really, really rapidly in a way that is not possible with the blue links. Now how did it, why does it stack rank these in the way that it does? Why does it order these in the way that it does? Why is HubSpot in one of them and not in the other? If you actually go to our search creator tool, which is really an incredible brand research tool, these are trained on the Internet, right? The LLM is trained on the Internet. So there's a couple of interesting ways you can use this. First of all, it's actually interesting to see how many mentions you have in comparison to other competitors in your marketing market. And our tool actually give you that. Our tool will basically just tell you how much awareness do I have in the LLM? That is one of the ways that you can start to figure out how I can optimize. Because the more awareness you have, probably the more you're going to get surfaced. And then you can look at sentiment analysis, right? The LLMs can actually tell you how do people feel about your product. Positive, negative, neutral. And that's one of the things our AI search grader tool can do for you. We'll put the link in the show notes. So this Also, this ChatGPT search engine is actually a great brand research tool. What I would look at here of why HubSpot is not appearing in upmarket is co citation word co citations. And so I suspect what happens in LLMs is the more your product is co sided with other words that would make the LLM think that you belong in either of those categories, the more you're going to actually appear in one of those categories. So HubSpot is likely co sided a lot as a CRM. For SMB, we are also an incredibly comprehensive CRM for large businesses. But maybe we need to look at how many times we are co cited for words that would help the LLM realize that we are one of the best in choice platforms for these types of customers. So that's the experience. It's good, it's fast, it's pretty great and comparable. If you've used the blue links and now you're using this, it's a much better experience. It's faster, it's easier for the average user. We're not going to get into all queries. Google Blue links are still going to be better for some queries in the short term and the medium term, but it's faster and easier. What do we know about faster and easier? Go to the homepage of any SaaS brand and they will say that they are the fastest and the easiest. Why? Because that's what users actually care about. And so if you have an application that is faster and easier, it will win out long term. What I found really interesting is just how excited Sam is around this tool. OpenAI have launched a lot of products. They obviously he is the CEO, he's excited by all the tools. This is the one that I've seen him all over X talking about how great that tool is. One of the things he talked about is just how much it's increased his usage of ChatGPT and I actually really believe this. I actually think it's going to be a great front door for OpenAI to expose more people to the actual powers of ChatGPT and get into to use chat GPT search is the front door for the Internet. This is a great thing for Chat GBT to own and so I see an increase in usage of ChatGPT overall. One of the things they have a problem with is churn. If you look at the churn for Chat GBT it is not good but the fact that they have billions of users, they have a lot of just distribution to play with and I think Chat GPT search is a great front door for people and again it's all within the same application that kind of ever known personal assistant. So it's going to be great at getting them to increase usage for their own product. I want to quickly get on to the Chrome extension. So this is the one of the other things that Sam was talking about and this is another like tough thing for Google, right? If people actually really start to use this Chrome extension, which I suspect they should. Let me kind of just show you quickly how this is how this works. Let me quickly show you how this works. So I go to Google Chrome and I can say how do I grow traffic in Chat gbt? And so you can search right now from the Chrome tab and it will bring you into search in ChatGPT. Super cool. And then it gives me the whole list of things that I can do to optimize for ChatGPT and again gives me the citations. So you can see here, it's jumped straight into ChatGPT search, giving me the answer, giving me the citations. You can go straight from Google Chrome, Google's product, right into ChatGPT. A really cool, disruptive way to start to grab traffic from their browser into ChatGPT's app. I want to finish with a couple of things here. All right, I'm going to wrap with a couple of things. First of all, Perplexity. This is a tough day for Perplexity. Perplexity is built on OpenAI's technology, ChatGPT. They've done a really great job. I can't. I'm going to misquote their numbers. I can probably just go ask ChatGPT. That's the. How many. This is a. Let's do this. How many monthly users does Perplexity have? All right, let's see. Here we go. Pretty awesome. Has approximately 15 million monthly active users. Awesome work from. They attract 50 million global visitors per month. Peaked with daily visitors, peaking at 2.7 million in 2024. Awesome. Perplexity have done a great job. Unfortunately. OpenAI has through billions of visitors, hundreds of millions of users and their technology and you've kind of built on their technology and now they've released a search engine which is kind of similar and likely going to be better than what you have built. And that is one of the problematic things for Perplexity. You can see a side by side here for ChatGPT search versus perplexity. Somewhat slightly different in that they have their sources at the top, but it's kind of pretty similar. And actually the feedback on this from the Twitter thread from people who know about this topic, which is some sort of GitHub, is that ChatGPT search was better, is actually better results and so not good for Perplexity. Straight out of the gate. ChatGPT is maybe a better experience, will get better over time for sure. And the thing you need to know here is again the distribution matters and ChatGPT can actually just open up distribution engine and get. Get tons and tons of people to use that last thing on. This is going to be Ethan's post. Right, let me just go in. All right, last thing we have to end with. Of course there's a caveat around this, right? ChatGPT works differently than Google Search and it still does hallucinate. So Ethan Mollock, who is an incredible AI researcher, give a bunch of examples of where it was wrong. It give wrong title and run abstract, give wrong authors and had a bunch of different mistakes. And so what's happening here? If you actually look at any of the benchmarks that's being released, the more you ask AI to do the same task, the less reliable it is over time. So there are still some reliability issues with AI, there are still some hallucination issues. AI is trying to give you the best version of the answer it believes is right. But again, it's using human content in a lot of cases, right? It's retrieving it from all of this human content which can be inaccurate and it does not know. And so Google do have a pretty sophisticated algorithm to figure out what is the right or wrong answer. Does not always work. But OpenAI and ChatGPT search are still going to have a bunch of hallucination problems, a bunch of reliability issue problems, and so it's not going to be perfect out of the gate. I still think the average user is going to opt to use it in a lot of cases because again, it is faster and easier. So that is all you need to know about ChatGPT search. A huge launch, pretty exciting. If you're a premium user, you should be playing around with it, getting to know it right there and then. What does this mean for us marketers and organic traffic? The average site, I think this year is probably down around 10% from my network. That's what I hear. I remember people telling me on LinkedIn two years ago when I talked about Chat GPT being disruptive blanks. They're like, it's never going to happen. It's an inferior product. It will not cause any cannibalization. We're only at the stage where they've launched their search engine, but we've already seen cannibalization just through the day to day product. It is going to cannibalize organic traffic. You would be crazy for thinking it's not going to. How much? I don't know. What kind of referral traffic will we now get from ChatGPT Search? Because it has citations. I don't know. How do you appear in ChatGPT search? How do you optimize results for ChatGPT search? Going to do a separate episode on it really, really soon. Go look at our previous episode. Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite we actually did give you a bunch of tips there of how to appear in LLMs. We'll do an updated version of this, but this is ChatGPT Search. Go play around with it. A huge day in the AI evolution. That's everything for marketing. Against the grain.

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