Guess Who's Taking on Google?
OpenAI’s SearchGPT Enters Search Fray
POV by Mike Morris, VP, Paid Search
Big news out of Silicon Valley has everyone buzzing about Open AI’s entry into the search market with their SearchGPT engine. Their vision is to evolve from the historical Google layout, to one where it’s AI-powered model summarizes its findings and displays short descriptions enhanced with links to its sources of information should the user choose to visit those specific pages.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been very critical of Google and their blue links with the belief that the future of the optimal search engine allows users to “search in a more intuitive and natural way.”(1)
SearchGPT will be in a limited-release testing phase of 10,000 users before it becomes available to the public. Everyone else will have to wait on the edge of their seats before attaining hands-on experience.
What We Are Likely to See
- Engage with extended results in the sidebar Ability to ask follow-up questions
- Linkouts and source material availability
- Using direct content feeds with 3rd party partners to build its search results
- Publishers’ ability to manage how they appear in featured content
- Utilization of the GPT-4o mini model, an offshoot of GPT-4o – this is their fastest model to date
- The goal is to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT
SearchGPT Results opens a question box to create a more natural conversational environment
Glimpses Into How Search Might Change
We have already entered the next generation phase of Search Engines and how users utilize them, but this step intensifies the already heated race for future search market share (and we haven’t even mentioned social platforms). The exorbitant speed at which this technology is progressing and making these significant changes possible is creating an extremely exciting time to be in marketing. While OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, it’s in need of cashflow as its on pace to lose about $5 billion this year. It will be interesting to see if business operations play a role in this space moving forward and if an acquisition of Perplexity AI occurs, which offers functionality extremely similar.
Our Recommendation
Its unclear at this point what the advertiser opportunity is post prototype phase, and when an eventual full rollout of SearchGPT will take place. We are engaging in early conversations with the platform to discover alpha and beta opportunities for clients.
Not to be discounted is Google’s actions in this race and their approach with their tool, Gemini.
