Let’s get this out of the way: This is not an article about how to use AI to improve your Search Engine Optimization. Tons of content creators have already talked about this ad nauseam (“Do your keyword research!” “Let it write your first drafts!” “Don’t forget to check the outputs!”) 

TL;DR it’s a whole lot of yatta yatta that you can figure out with a few minutes of playing around.

No, today we’re talking about a bigger question: “What does it mean?” 

ChatGPT Search: An Overview

Generative AI has likely been on your radar (and ours) for a couple of years now. But ChatGPT’s new search feature, launched in late October, may be a little newer to you. With it came some renewed optimism that original content still has a place in the evolving search market. 

To be fair, this is nothing relatively new. Another popular AI “answer engine,” Perplexity, is a forerunner experience that answers queries while citing sources. Google also introduced Gemini-enhanced summaries to its traditional search experience in May 2024. 

But as the de facto generative AI solution (think Xerox or Kleenex here), ChatGPT’s foray into search could mean that Microsoft finally found a horse that can run with Google. That’s because ChatGPT Search combines Bing’s search index with ChatGPT’s generative AI chatbot. 

The results are more conversational than what you may get from a traditional search experience. But it also seeks to improve where ChatGPT has lacked oomph, or zhuzh, as the kids say. The search feature improves its data recency to a nearly day-of experience, while “vanilla” ChatGPT relies on data indexed as recently as October 2023.

As many have already mentioned, ChatGPT Search still has a ways to go before it earns our explicit trust. False confidence, “hallucinations,” and misattribution still abound. In a short example, I tested this out with one of my favorite subjects: basketball.

I asked ChatGPT Search a question about the current NBA season’s statistics for two reasons: First, as discussed already, recency is a major blind spot with generative AI. Second, despite ChatGPT’s improvement in reasoning, it may still experience AI hallucinations, or falter when a user’s prompt isn’t specific enough, as we’ll demonstrate in the following example.

So I asked, “Which NBA players have posted at least three triple-doubles this season?” For the non-sports junkies out there, a triple double is when a basketball player posts double-digit statistics in three separate categories; usually in points, rebounds, and assists. I received this answer: 

You’ll notice that it cites Statmuse and Fox Sports, both of which are reliable sources and correctly attributed here. Except, as you may have also noticed, those stats are from LAST season. 

When I pointed this out to the bot, my regenerated result was wholly accurate. The second iteration correctly reasoned that I wanted stats from the 2024-25 season. We verified both the Statmuse and Fox Sports with official NBA data as of December 5, 2024.

 

So human verification is still very important at this stage of AI search. But, as we’ll discuss shortly, the relative accuracy of its answers is irrelevant in a populist sense. 

The people have spoken, and they want more generative AI in their search. The proverbial Pandora’s Box is open now, and I don’t think we’re going back any time soon.

Alphabet soup: How ChatGPT and other generative AI engines are eating into Google’s market share

In August 2023, a Bank of America report estimated that ChatGPT only captured 2% of Google’s month-over-month traffic — a scant 55 million vs. 2.8 billion.

Small potatoes, right? After all, Google’s been the big kid on the block for quite some time, holding about 90% of global search volume.

SEO experts jumped to assure us nothing was happening and Google was still king. But as we’ll discuss, that take aged like milk.

That’s because a recent survey released by investment firm Evercore found that 8% of Americans used ChatGPT as their go-to search engine. That number was 1% in a similar June survey.

It doesn’t end there. Because another survey from SEO guru Rand Fishkin estimated that a more holistic share would include YouTube and various social media platforms that aren’t classified as search engines. With that data in mind, ChatGPT still holds 4.33% of search volume as of October 2024.

If you’re going by Fishkin’s data, that’s over a 300% increase in usage. If you’re going by Evercore’s numbers, that’s a 700% increase. 

Either way, this is staggeringly unprecedented. If Google wasn’t worrying about the new kid on the block, they are now. It’s shaping up to be a real David-and-Goliath story — you remember how David received $10 billion in Microsoft backing.

The landscape of SEO is changing in a big way. While Google was arguably the only search engine truly worth optimizing for, the market is now the most diverse since the late ‘90s. Who remembers asking Jeeves a thing or two, right?

So, is SEO dead? I’ve heard this question for as long as I’ve been performing SEO, which is now a dozen years. The answer is, and always has been, no — it’s just evolved. Again.

Tips to improve your SEO strategy for generative AI and AI search

A lot of the same things you were doing before generative AI rolled out still matter. Quality, well-written, engaging content was and is still the way to attract consistent readership. 

But our approach to technically and creatively earning organic traffic must shift to accommodate Large Language Models. Specifically we need to account more for Bing. And even more specifically, we need to account for ChatGPT.

1. Use your robots.txt file to give explicit permission to Chat GPT to crawl your site

If you’re willing to play ball with OpenAI (or not), you’ll need to make sure you’re explicitly telling them that. The most direct way to do so is within your website’s robots.txt file, where you can allow (or disallow) specific search engine “crawlbots” from indexing your content. 

Note that allowing or disallowing any bot is just a directive; there’s no guarantee that it will follow your instructions, but it’s much more likely to with the robots.txt file’s added direction.

There are three specific bots that ChatGPT uses to index content. You can choose to allow or disallow “OAI-SearchBot” in your site’s robots.txt (and here’s how to do that): 

• OAI-SearchBot: This bot is the one hunting down content. This crawlbot is used explicitly for indexing within the ChatGPT Search feature. This bot should be allowed if you wish for your content to be indexed for ChatGPT Search.

• ChatGPT-User: This bot is the one referencing the content it’s already hunted down. ChatGPT uses this crawlbot to include source links to user queries within responses. You’ll also want to allow this one if you want to show up in ChatGPT results at all.

• GPTBot: Used to train ChatGPT’s AI model. Allow or disallow at your own discretion. 

There’s no guarantee your content will be used in search results, but to quote Michael Scott quoting Wayne Gretzky, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.x

If you specifically do not want any of your content to be indexed by any engine, as is the case for many password-protected pages, you’ll need to mark those webpages with the “noindex” tag.

2. Use more long-tail keyphrases and conversational-based queries

I’m confident that “Conversational search” will be the SEO buzzword of 2025.

Keyword research is obviously still a priority, but the way you execute it should change slightly to accommodate more “plain speak” and common questions than ever before.

Think about how far we’ve come since the days of early Google search; you had specific properties like quotations, “and,” “but,” or “not” that you had to input as specific instructions. You can still do that, but the semantics have gotten so much better. 

As a result, people are used to asking real questions of their search engine, similarly to the way we would converse with another person at a party. Brands should further optimize their content to answer questions like: 

• “Which restaurant has the best crabs in Baltimore?”
• “What Maryland schools can I get into with a 3.5 GPA?”
• “How can I pay my electric bill online?”
• “Which project management software is the best?”

3. Add an FAQ page to your website

UX professionals, like myself, used to think that FAQ pages made for bad user experiences. We might want to rethink that. Written well enough to reflect common questions that users may ask, FAQs can actually be a great tool for answering conversational queries. 

But they could also help your site get picked up by these AI search engines. They’re also beneficial for appearing in Google’s Featured Snippets and People Also Ask sections.

4. Use schema markup

Schema markup helps search engines understand more context on your website. Google uses it to identify several things, such as: 

• People
• Addresses
• Events
• Organizations
• Reviews (e.g. 1-5 stars)

It’s a practice we’ve recommended for several years because Google uses schema markup to support its own search engine’s semantic understanding of content. It indirectly improves SEO as schema populates Featured Snippets, Google Business details, and more. But now with AI chatbots as several people’s primary search engine, schema markups become even more important.

That’s because OpenAI introduced Structured Outputs in August 2024 to support JSON Schemas in their API. This was significant in that developers could structure more appropriate outputs. It also signals to SEO professionals that ChatGPT uses schema markups to understand content semantics.

You can find a comprehensive list of acceptable schema formats on schema.org, but it’s best to let a professional SEO expert and/or developer implement it properly.

5. Consider Mindgrub for your next SEO or AI-related project

Whether you’re trying to increase organic traffic or launch an immersive AI app, it can be a lot of hard work. That’s especially true of the latter, with so many unknowns and possibilities yet to discover with AI. 

Mindgrub’s combined decades (centuries, really) of experience can help you get there. Our “Sprint Zero” project stage helps us lay the groundwork for success early on so we don’t have to throw the kitchen sink at it later. 

So give us a holler. You won’t be disappointed.