Before we get started, we wanted to warn you that this is not an article that dives into the mechanisms of AI and how it may or may not impact your business and the future as we know it. While we do have some thoughts on the very large topic of AI and its pros and cons in the small business world (we can share those in another blog post), we’re here to focus specifically on a marketing topic of interest to us and our small business clients, which is content marketing and online search. 

Content marketing can be a powerful tool in your small business marketing tool belt, and its success as a tactic depends on understanding the process of online search and meeting your potential customers where they are in their journey. That’s why our ears perked up at the announcement that the company OpenAI announced their own competitor to Google Search, called SearchGPT. If SearchGPT takes off, that would mean we as marketers will need to advise clients employing content marketing on how to navigate this new search engine. 

For you as a small business owner, we just want to help keep you aware of what’s going on in the marketing world. As you’ll read in this article, we don’t think SearchGPT is something you need to pay attention to immediately, but for now, we hope you take a read through this, and file it away for future reference. 

What is SearchGPT?

SearchGPT is a newly-launched feature from the company OpenAI, which makes the AI Chatbot ChatGPT. They’ve taken their existing ChatGPT and added new features to it to compete in the world of online search. 

The newly launched feature SearchGPT is not available to all users of ChatGPT yet. It’s been launched first to paid users and OpenAI says they will be rolling out the tool to free users “in the coming months.”

Those who have been awarded access with their paid accounts describe SearchGPT as functioning closely to regular ChatGPT in that you start by posing a question to the bot, and it searches through all relevant information and then summarizes an answer for you. The biggest difference between Chat and Search, though, is that SearchGPT is then adding a sidebar of “Citations” to your browsing window, meaning it provides attribution links to where it found the information used to answer your question for you. In addition, it can provide real-time information like breaking news, weather, and sports information, which is something ChatGPT could not do before.

As you hear on the news every day, AI is largely considered to have big implications for many industries, both good and bad. In terms of the AI Chatbots on the market, for right now they’re just really good at regurgitating information that already exists in a cohesive way to answer a user’s question. Time will tell what the future holds for this technology.

How Does It Compare To Google Search?

Both Google and SearchGPT attempt to provide you answers to all the world’s questions at your fingertips, but where they differ is in how they approach providing the answer. When you Google a question, Google provides you with hundreds of news stories, blog articles, listicles, and forums that match the keywords you searched and your intent to the best of its abilities. You then visit each of these links to determine your own answer to your question.

SearchGPT works slightly differently. When you ask the chatbot a question, it searches through all relevant information, and then it spits back out to you a summarized answer to your question. Then, on the side, it shows you a list of citations that it pulled the information from. So, you get your answer immediately, but it’s up to you to double-check the bot’s work by visiting the citations. 

To get the best answers from each of these search engines, it’s also different how you should approach your questions. For example, if you’re looking for ideas for Fall cocktails at your distillery, you may type into Google “Fall whiskey cocktail ideas.” Whereas you may type into SearchGPT “What Fall cocktails work well with barrel-proof whiskey?”  Google wants keywords to match, and some intent, hence why you used the word “ideas” to show your intent with your search. SearchGPT, on the other hand, works better if you use a more conversational question format, with as much detail as possible to produce the best results.

Another big difference between the two services is that Google has an extensive infrastructure to support location-based searches, otherwise known as local searches, otherwise known as “near me searches.” This is because of Google’s map and business profile tools. Right now, SearchGPT does not provide as valuable information if you’re using it to search for businesses “near me.”

Finally, a major difference between Google search and SearchGPT? The transparency and documentation of how their search tools work. Google provides regular written documentation about its algorithm updates as well as podcasts, conferences, videos and more to help support its explanations. OpenAI does not yet provide such documentation, as the race for the best AI tool is a tight one, but it is possible it could provide some in the future.

Does SearchGPT Have Marketing Implications For My Small Business?

Our short answer to this question is: at the moment, not really. It’s a brand new tool that’s not even available to all ChatGPT users yet, so it’s unlikely you’ll have thousands of potential customers using it to search about your business or industry next week, or next month. Just consider this article our quick “FYI” to you. You’ve got plenty of bigger fish to fry in the immediate term. 

Long term, though, it’s worth paying attention to. After all, when it comes to your small business, if there’s a new place where potential customers could find you, we want you to show up there! How you can prepare is to create content now for your business that SearchGPT will be able to easily digest in the future. That means writing your content in natural language (write the way people speak!), anticipating questions that customers may have about your business or industry and their follow-up questions as well.

We recommend that you write your content this way regardless of SearchGPT. Google has been improving its algorithms for the last several years—maybe in anticipation of this new technology, it’s hard to say—but certainly to improve its customer experience and crack down on gross spammy content that people write to “game” Google’s algorithm. Right now Google’s advice for writing content for search is to be original, helpful, and organized, which sounds a lot like SearchGPT anyway, doesn’t it? 

Lastly, according to SearchGPT’s early adopters, the service is using what it calls an “online consensus” to determine a business’s authority on the subject. That means if it sees a business with ratings and reviews on many sites, guest articles on industry websites, etc, it feels like it’s a safe bet that the business is an authority on the subject. That means that it’s beneficial for your small business to spread your authority around too, however, once again this isn’t that different from what Google likes to see either, so you should be doing this regardless as well!

Thoughts On Search In General

ChatGPT getting into the search engine game is just one example of how the online search industry is changing rapidly. 

Google is still the leader in online search, but a recent ruling on an antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice determined that Google has an illegal monopoly over online searches. Depending on the changes Google is forced to make as a result of this ruling, consumers could be introduced to search engines that they weren’t previously aware of, and new competitors could enter the market to provide even more choice.

In addition to the possibility of more choice within search engines, consumers are already fracturing their online searches among apps that you may not think of as traditional search engines. YouTube, for example, is used widely as a search engine by people looking for video answers to their questions. Tik Tok is also a big player in search for people looking for video answers. Another one, Pinterest, has flown under the radar for years as a major search engine, but with 522 million monthly users, it’s a huge source for search results of all types. Finally, shopping websites like Amazon can also serve as search engines, with shoppers going straight to Amazon to search for a product, instead of Googling it first.

All this means for you is more ways for customers to interact with you (yay!), but more consideration to take into how you share content about your business on these different platforms. If you have physical products to sell on Amazon, you should consider how your descriptions could match searches, for example. Or your TikTok and YouTube content and captions if you’re writing an editorial calendar for those platforms. We can talk about this in even further detail in a follow-up blog post.

For now, keep doing what you’re doing! And don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you need help.