ChatGPT is challenging Google’s dominance in search 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 surge in popularity and usage of ChatGPT, with 1 million users in 5 days, shows that there can be great alternatives to the search engines we use daily.
I don’t know Google’s plans, but I will not be surprised to see something like ChatGPT appear in a box on the side of the Google SERP (search results 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 queries directly on their pages, without users needing to visit our websites, even though we are 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 that directly answer the current search query on the result pages, without the user needing to visit the websites linked in the organic results section.
As I predicted, more and more searches are now being resolved on the result pages without the need to visit any website, such as ChatGPT.
I see hard times ahead for SEO specialists like me and everyone involved in organic search.
Unintended consequences
At the moment, companies producing high-quality content are highly rewarded 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 will be close to zero because users will consume it directly on the chatbot’s pages. 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 an exciting year ahead of us!
Franco lives and works in the e-commerce territory, a wild area between the Kingdom of Technology and the Land of Marketing. He speaks the languages of both realms fluently. For many years, Franco has been helping people bridge the divide and collaborate successfully.
If you want to find out more about Franco, visit his LinkedIn profile or send him an email folini[at]gmail.com
