SearchGPT: How You Can Test It Now & It's Implications for SEO Marketing

Search is already inside the answer

SearchGPT is not the first way ChatGPT has accessed the web. Bing results have been available inside ChatGPT, and the assistant has increasingly searched without making the process feel like a separate visit to a search engine. The new product matters because it makes that behavior explicit and points toward a future where people ask a conversational system for an answer instead of starting with a results page.

That distinction matters for marketers. A traditional search visit gives a business an opportunity to earn a click, show an offer, and move someone through a site. An AI answer may summarize several sources and satisfy the user before the source page opens. Visibility still matters, but the unit of competition becomes being selected and cited inside the answer.

Test the behavior before planning around it

SearchGPT was in beta for limited users when this episode was recorded, so the practical approach was to test what was already available. Ask ChatGPT questions relevant to your audience and compare an answer with search enabled and one without it. Notice which sources appear, how current the information is, and whether the answer cites a business or merely repeats a generic claim.

That exercise reveals gaps in your content. If the assistant cannot understand what you do, who you help, or why your recommendation is credible, the problem may be your public evidence. Improve the source material: publish clear explanations, original research, useful comparisons, and pages that answer the actual question.

Prepare for a different SEO mix

Google is not going to disappear overnight. It has enormous distribution and a long-established business model. But people are not loyal to a particular interface. They move when a new tool gives them a better answer. I already use ChatGPT for repairs, decisions, and quick facts, especially when Siri can deliver the answer while my hands are busy.

That means SEO planning should include more than rankings. Build authority across your site, video, podcast, newsletter, and third-party references. Create material an AI system can retrieve and a human can trust. Paid search may change too if direct answers reduce the number of searches available to bid on.

The right response is neither panic nor dismissal. Use the available search behavior now, watch what gets cited, and make your expertise easier to understand. SearchGPT is an early signal that search marketing will reward trusted sources, not just pages optimized for a keyword.

hello and welcome back to the AI driven marketer my name is Dan Sanchez my friends call me danz and today we're talking about search GPT yes that is the new search engine being released by chat GPT very soon it's in beta right now for a limited amount of users and I imagine it'll be coming to us soon at least within the next few months it seems like everything the big AI companies put out there is always like look at this but you won't have access to it for little while I made an episode about that a few weeks ago because that's kind of what's Happening they they they like the pr splash of pushing out things but on this particular one I wanted to do a whole episode because the cool thing about search GPT is that search it's it's kind of already available in chat GPT and a lot of people don't realize it so let's talk about that let's talk about what's actually already there and what's coming down and how how it's different than what we currently have available with search in chat GPT so first let's talk about what's already there yes search you've been able to search from within chat GPT for at least a year now probably a little over a year and it is through not its own search engine but Bing you've been able to access Bing through the search results and it actually makes your results much much better in fact a few weeks ago a friend notified me that his search results that he was getting back from chat GPT were just so good or not the search results but just his answer to a question and what I found is Chad GPT is been sneakily like including search results in your chat G after your after your prompts more and more often without you even having to ask for it which is why chat GPT has actually gotten better producing good results for you um and I can show you the difference of what your your conversation with CHP looks like with search and without search um luckily it doesn't do it all the time so I can provide an example of what it looks like without it doing the search but and if you ask it to it will do the search so I'm going to open up my desktop here and if you're watching on video you'll be able to follow along but if you're just listening then you should be just as good otherwise because I'll be explaining as I walk through these prompts and what I'm getting back as results but if you want to watch you can watch on Apple podcast just open up the full full window to see the video you can watch on YouTube or Aid driven marketer um but like I said let's jump in and you'll still be able to follow along pretty well even if you're just listening so here I have chat GPT for open and I it's just clean this is not a custom GPT this is just vanilla chat GPT 40 and I asked it the question what are the best podcasts for B2B marketers right and this is a similar search that I I asked like way back in December of 2022 when chat GP was first out and this is honestly a very similar list that I got back then I don't remember exactly what I asked then but it was pretty similar to this I'm sure if I go back through my search history I could find it but here we have here it's this is the results I get and I can tell it didn't search because what it what I did do when I asked it to search was a different result so here's what it gave me without it going to being to search it gave me btb growth and it gives a description the for each one it gives a description it says the marketing book podcast the marketing over coffee the CMO podcast the marketing smarts podcast s podcast B2B marketing leaders podcast btb Revenue leadership flip my funnel in the intelligent inbound podcast top 10 I'm going it gives a little description of each as a number ordered here and it's great I used to be used to be a host for bdb growth and I know that even when I searched back in 2022 it gave me a very similar list and I was excited back then because I was a host of that show at that time for sweet fish media exciting a lot of similar podcasts that I see in search results a lot if you just go and search on Apple podcast for B2B marketing a lot of these podcasts will pop up because they're keyword heavy hence we have bdb marketing leaders let's see marketing book podcast pretty popular bdb Revenue leadership still we have some that don't keyword heavy let flip my funnel which is a podcast with worked on at sweet fish and the podcasts but still like these come up in B2B marketing conversations somewhat regularly now let me show you what it looked like when I added a slight tweak to The Prompt I'm going to switch tabs here I'm going to go to a fresh fresh chat window and I just changed the prompt just slightly I said can you do a search on Bing to find the best podcast to listen to for bdb marketers same prompt just I asked it to do a search on Bing and the results it got back were actually much better fortunately bdb growth did not show up on this list but that might be telling for bdb growth over the last couple of years even though it's still a very influential podcast we have a different set we have Confessions of a B2B marketer B2B marketing exchange breaking B2B exit 5 B2B marketing with Dave gearheart Revenue vitals btb Playbook the growth podcast CR like the greats GV audio experience and the founder podcast if you're in B2B marketing you're probably looking at some of these podcasts you're like uh yeah look there's Chris Walker's podcast and there's Dave gearheart like those are two of the most influential people in B2B marketing right now and have been for the last couple of years and the difference is it went and searched for six use being to search and it has a little indicated right here at the top of its response search six sites and you can actually click it it's a drop down it gives you all six of the sites whose information it used to create the list and what I think is these are probably top ranking in fact we can just open up Bing right now or not bring Bing right go B2B marketing podcast and let's see what it actually found right did we get the same list I'm looking I'm trying to see which ones are ads here let's see bdb marketing guide unleash possible nope it actually is skipping over specific results and just going to the aggregator results here's cognism here's foundation and it's actually using Bings I'm seeing some of the same ones but I'm also seeing there's the CMO here's Apple podcast bdb marketing podcast and apple podcast it did not Source this it's just pulling the aggregator post so it's pulling listicles it didn't go to Yelp it didn't go to a lot of different places here it's really just pulling from the listicle results in order to create this list that we're looking at so listicles are going to be big I mean they have been big in the SEO world for a long time but in AI search it's just going to get bigger we'll talk about that in a minute in in how this is going to impact search engine optimization but even if you look at these results each one of these has the same numbered list you know with the name of the podcast and a description of it but it also has a new thing it has it has the reference for where it pulled the information now I think it's not quite I don't know why it's pulling it's pulling references to say like this is where I found this specific podcast but you got to remember it searched through six sites and probably pulled like how often are these being mentioned across these six aggregate sites that we found and that's what it's using to determine top right because that's kind of subjective Top by what it doesn't have access to the download information of the show otherwise it would probably just pull that list so it's using how often it's being mentioned on aggregate sites in order to rank these podcasts and I actually find that it did a pretty dang good job because it's actually pulling ones that I know for a fact are influential like exit 5 and revenue vitals from Chris Walker and but this is a preview of what's to come in search so this is already available on chat gbt and it's even it's like I said before it's doing this more and more often without you even having to ask to do a search on Bing that's what my friend did a search for companies that service Cisco like how the heck would chat GPT know which company service Cisco but if it goes to Bing to find the information its results are going to be much better A friend told me about how accurate the search results were and then I went and broke apart his search his AI conversation I'm like ah it's doing searching without him even asking for it which is why the results are getting better because if you have to pull from chat gpt's long-term memory at least that's what I call it then the results can be kind of fuzzy kind of like this last list we got before it's doing it based on a like a long you think about long-term memory it can be fuzzy even for ourselves right we've seen these things before so we're just recalling them kind of loosely from the back of our brain that's exactly what AI is doing to pull together this last list but what's always better is if we can go and do a fresh search for information then recall them and analyze them it's going to do a much better job so humans do the same thing AI when it does it does gets better results just like humans do so that's why it's exciting to see search Incorporated more and more into what AI is finding because it's just going to be able to provide more accurate faster and better results just more quickly I think he's going to be Boon for research like it's going to be really helpful for pulling more accurate results now it's not fully accurate even with perplexity it's conf it can be confidently wrong uh at times so chat GPT like perplexity can be just as wrong like for example I did a search on how much it would cost in general to reupholster a car right all the chairs and the covers and the ceiling and all that kind of stuff as I've been in the use car market dealing with that um and it gave me some very confident estimates back but then I went and did a search result and found that it was actually pulling from furniture reupholster price estimates which are very off it was like three to five times more expensive to reupholster a car than it was to reupholster furniture which makes a lot of sense a car incorporates a lot more stuff and is more particular than furniture reupholstery right because your car has to be able to stand up against heat better has to deal with different conditions it gets used and abused a little bit more than Furniture because Furniture is easier to swap out right and is generally more than Furniture so but it was confident that car upholstery cost you know like a th000 or $2,000 and really it cost like five six 7,000 it's way off so but it was confidently wrong and so you still have to be aware of that but it's getting more accurate now that it's able to pull from fresh information and digest the information and give it back to you right there so that is super helpful for our work being happening with AI and for our research being done with AI but what does this mean for SEO few considerations like I've mentioned already it's pulling more from aggregators more them from direct results so if you're hoping to get a boost of traffic coming from AI just know that your product pages aren't going to be useful if your homepage is ranking number one for a great keyword term that's great for people searching in traditional results you're going going straight to your homepage optimize for sales but AI is going to be skipping over that so if I do a search for something like best X tools if your homepage ranks for that it's not going to be referencing your homepage it's going to skip over your homepage and is now going to be referencing the blog underneath it maybe from your competitor that's doing a listicle of best X tools here's our favorites those are what are winning in AI search and this isn't the first time I've seen it I've seen it over and over and over again where it's pulling aggregate results and this is true even for people who are testing the new beta search feature coming out for the search GPT that's coming out soon when that comes out it's the only difference between what I'm seeing between what I've seen from people doing the search with search GPT and what's currently available in chat GPT is that it's just a more robust search so it has more metadata involved it has more sources it has more pictures and different types of media depending on the search that you're doing but if you want to get a preview of what search GPT is going to be like just open up chat GPT and ask it to do a search on Bing shoot you've probably already seen it because it's doing this more and more often already so that's where we're at with sech as it relates to Ai and chat GPT and I feel like this is going to be continue to be a trend which means the other AI companies are going to be doing of course Google's already doing it but anthropic is probably going to catch on to this as well because it's just super useful and it makes the search it makes your AI results better so be paying attention to this if you're an SEO and be paying attention to this as an AI marketer because it's making better AI results and we all needed as AI marketers try to make our results as contextual and as contextual as well as relevant as possible in order to automate our processes and get more for Less with our time so to wrap up this episode thank you so much for listening if this episode has been just a little helpful to you and giving you a nugget of what's to come and how to get better as an AI marketer please give this show a rating in apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcast just give it the Star tap the stars that you think this episode or this podcast is worth if you leave a comment that's even better but even the Stars help this podcast be found by more people and if you're just getting started 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