OpenAI just launched SearchGPT, their LLM-based Search Engine. This is going to have massive implications to SEO/PPC and more so, for Google.
An interesting timeline for Google:
* Google has dominated the search market for decades with over 90%+ search market share worldwide.
* In 2010, Amazon starting chipping away at consumer shopping behavior. while Google was once the clear go-to destination for shopping, over 50% of consumers reported starting their shopping journey on Amazon.
* Despite the threat to shopping based queries, they continued to maintain dominance in the information/navigation space with no clear contenders in sight.
* In February 2023, Bing rolled out Bing Chat, an AI powered chat experience powered by OpenAI. For the first time in the history of the world, there was a group of people who preferred Bing to Google. It wasn't a sizable shift but it foreshadowed an opening for a AI-first contender to search for Google.
* Around this same time, ChatGPT took the world by storm and became the FASTEST growing product in the history of the world. It was, for some, a better experience for searching for information.
* This year ChatGPT, Perplexity and other LLM-based solutions have started to steal marketshare from that traditional information-based market share Google has held in dominance for so many years.
* Now, a fully powered AI search engine built, not by Google, but by the industry leaders in LLMs/AI is here and for the first time in many many decades is there a path for Google to loose it's dominance in such an important market.
* During this same time, Google had to pull back it's AI Search solution from ~70% of searches down to 7% due to low-quality responses and outputs, and general concern from the public.
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An important call out on the OpenAI Strategy. They seem to "get it" - they're heavily focused on partnering with the publisher ecosystem, something Google didn't do much of during their AI Overview rollout which has since been rolled back to ~7% of total queries.
"SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches. Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links so users know where information is coming from and can quickly engage with even more results in a sidebar with source links."