ChatGPT is challenging Google’s dominance in the search engine field with a radically new approach based on Machine Learning. Instead of providing links to websites with the information, ChatGPT provides the answers on its pages. This seems to be making SEO and organic searches obsolete, but the story is more complicated than that!
The sudden success in popularity and usage by ChatGPT, with 1 million users in 5 days, shows us that there can be great alternatives to the search engines we use daily.
I don’t know the Google plans, but I will not be surprised to see something like the ChatGPT appearing on a box on the side of the Google SERP (result pages). If and when this happens, it will be the end of organic results and SEO. Google organic will stop being the primary source of visitors to our websites. Another casualty of such changes will be the traffic to our websites.
I see a near future where tools like ChatGPT and Google will answer most of the queries and questions directly on their pages without the need for the users to visit our websites, despite being the source of information.
To confirm my vision, Google is already feeling the heat of chatGPT as a viable alternative to its search engine. It has been less than a week since ChatGPT opened its pages to regular users, and Google is already taking action by giving more space and visibility to the Featured Snippets. These are short text snippets extracted from the most popular websites answering the current search query directly on the result pages with no need for the user to visit the websites linked in the organic result section.
As I predicted, more and more searches are now being resolved on the result pages without the need to visit any website, precisely as chatGPT.
I see hard times ahead for SEO specialists like me and everybody else involved in organic search.
Unintended consequences
At the moment, there are great rewards for companies producing high-quality content as long as their content has been properly optimized for SEO. However, when ChatGPT and similar tools take over traditional search engines, the reward for publishing good content would be close to zero because users will consume it directly on the pages of the chatbot. Without fresh content, the chatbot will have fewer opportunities to train itself, and the quality of its answers will start to degrade and lose freshness.
Chatbots are destroying the same ecosystem they need to prosper and stay competitive. It looks like we have some exciting year ahead of us!
Franco lives and works in the eCommerce territory, a wild area between the Kingdom of Technology and the Land of Marketing. He speaks fluently the language of both realms. For many years, Franco has been helping people bridge the divide and successfully collaborate.
If you want to find out more about Franco, visit his LinkedIn profile or send him an email folini[at]gmail.com
Franco Folini 