ChatGPT Search. Is this a new content opportunity?

Are we witnessing the beginning of a post-Google search era? Maybe. Is there a new editorial void waiting to be filled? Definitely.

ChatGPT launched its search functionality towards the end of last week. 

Initially only paid subscribers will be able to search the web, but soon enterprise and free users will also be able to perform those absolutely essential searches for football scores or reasons why their ankle is swollen, or simply question ChatGPT whether an umbrella is needed for their commute tomorrow.

But if you’re a publisher or content marketer, you should be thinking about something completely different now.

The BBC’s flagship afternoon current affairs radio show PM covered the launch of Google’s biggest new search competitor (although it’s worth noting Meta is also investing in the expansion of its AI search functionality) in an attempt to explain the significance of Open AI’s move to the public.

BBC’s tech correspondent's Zoe Kleinmann’s report made me think about the less obvious opportunities for publishers and brands, though.

She, erm, chatgpted (and we thought to google was bad as a verb) her partner’s football club’s results and got a very accurate answer, albeit not in real time because the team wasn’t playing that day.

She then searched for something about trending jeans and got a neat summary of the latest sartorial advice from the pages of some fashion magazines.

But to her surprise, no shopping links. So this will be interesting to watch of the coming months and years.

But the thing that really got me thinking was her search for the top BBC News story of the day. The result she got was irrelevant and nowhere near the actual story that was trending that day. And there’s a reason for that. 

While publishers like Condé Nast struck a deal with Open AI to allow the company to use its publications, the BBC doesn’t want open AI to use its content to train its models.

So for the ChatGPT Search to have a chance to really compete with Google, someone or something will need to very quickly fill the void left behind by the publishers, companies, or individuals who might be providing well researched, reliable and trustworthy information, but who might not be willing to have their content used to train large language models.

And it’s not just the current affairs providers. The same might be true for health, science, business, finance etc.

So while everyone has been optimising their pages for the past two decades to gain more visibility via Google, we’ll need to think about how to stay - or in some cases become - relevant in the new era of search.

Other questions - mostly around privacy and accuracy - will need to be answered too, obviously. 

But someone will need to grab that opportunity to replace what’s absent in ChatGPT Search results, assuming it stays absent.

Oh, and we need a catchy verb for this new search era to replace ‘googling’.

I hope we won’t be ‘chatting it’ now…

(If we will, you read it here first.)

This post was first published on LinkedIn.