On 25th July, OpenAI announced a prototype called SearchGPT on Twitter. According to OpenAI, its access is being shared with very limited people. There is a wait list in which paid users of ChatGPT can join now. And slowly, its access will be shared with those paid users. According to OpenAI’s announcement, it may not become an individual search engine.
Purpose and Functionality
OpenAI wants to test search features outside the environment of ChatGPT through this SearchGPT initiative. So that in the future, these search features can be integrated into ChatGPT. So chances are less that a new search engine will be launched. In fact, this function can be added inside ChatGPT. Now, we will know what will happen in the future.
Initial Impressions
But this SearchGPT is behaving like a search engine now. In fact, OpenAI has made a different crawler for this. You can see the details of this on the screen. OAI-SearchBot. This is the name of this crawler which is working for the SearchGPT search engine.
User Interface
Now, let’s see how this search engine looks like. This is its first look. The layout is divided into three columns. In the first column, we can see only three buttons. The second column is for citation. And the third is the main column, the main window where you can search. Whenever you give a prompt in the style of ChatGPT, type your search keyword or search phrase, the answer is shown in the form of OpenAI’s reply.
Citation and Source Details
But along with that, all the sources that are being used in that answer, i.e., the reference websites that are being used to make the answer, their citation is shown in the middle column. You can see more than five links in this column. It is possible that the more citations you see in the main answer, the more links of the source websites are shown here.
Comparison with Other AI Models
Now, as we have compared the answers of ChatGPT and Gemini many times, similarly, if I compare the answers of SearchGPT and the quality of OpenAI together, you will see that the quality of the answers of SearchGPT is better. And the citations that are being used, the URLs of the source websites, are also more in quantity and their relevancy is also very good.
Specific Queries and Results
And you get the answers in the right quality. Anyway, this search here is a very informational query, so the answer of an informational query can be anything. But if we do a specific query related to a product or service, for example, top email marketing software, you can see that the data is not being taken from any individual software website, but from an aggregator website.
Focus on Aggregator Websites
That is, information is being taken from such a website, which has a list of top 10, top 5 or top 20 email marketing software. So, if we take this answer as a hint, it means that in SearchGPT, the aggregator websites, rather than the product or service websites, which are reviewing such products or providing them as an affiliate, are going to be more popular.
Differences from Google Search
They will get more importance. And this trait is completely different from Google. Because Google wants to be different from aggregators. Google wants to give importance to individual product and service websites. It doesn’t always give, that’s a different thing. But in principle, Google wants to show individual business and service websites more in its search results.
Local Search Results
But here, SearchGPT is giving more importance to aggregators and the websites that provide the best list. Now, whether this is a good thing or not, this will be known only after the product is launched to more people. The third point is local search results. If a person puts near me with his query, you know, dentist near me, electrician near me, or a restaurant near me, if someone queries like this, then even without putting the name of the place, SearchGPT identifies your location with the help of your browser.
Aggregator Listings in Local Searches
Actually, it gives relevant answers from that place. It gives relevant answers to businesses from that place. But even when the list of businesses is being shown, the list is coming from the aggregator. So, for example, if you want to rank in the list of top restaurants in OpenAI’s SearchGPT, then maybe you need to take a good rank on TripAdvisor.
Advertising and Visibility
The impression of Google My Business will not work here anyway. But all the aggregator websites can be ranked here. Now, because SearchGPT is in its prototype phase, that’s why no ad is being shown in it. But if it is launched with the same user interface, then the link of the citation can be seen in the middle column.
Technical Points for SEOs
Here, you can see the link of the websites as per the number of citations you want. Title, headline, description, etc. can be shown as an ad. So, these were the simple things. But there are two technical points which are useful for SEOs. Number one, the site query works in this SearchGPT. That is, it is in the prototype now.
Site Query and OAI-SearchBot
But if you put a site query and search for a particular keyword, then you get the result from the same website. Which is a good thing. I mean, it means that it is not just presented as a prototype. It is an actual product which is being developed. And maybe when it is launched, then the site operator will also work in it.
Robots.txt Rules
All these operators will also work with Ind, URL, Int, Text. So, this is a good thing. And the second query is that OpenAI has already released its crawler, OAI-SearchBot. So, you can make rules for this bot in your robots.txt. The way you have made rules for Googlebot or Microsoft Bingbot, similarly, if you want your website to be shown in this OpenAI search result, to support in making their answers, so that you also get traffic from OpenAI, then you can keep the whole website open for this bot.
Blocking OAI-SearchBot
You can give the same rules that you have made for Google. But if you want your website or content not to be used in OpenAI’s search result, or its link not to be shown in the answers, or your website or content not to be used in making its answers, then you can put some kind of rule in robots.txt, in which you will tell the user agent that it is OAI-SearchBot, and then you can disallow all.
Conclusion
So, this is a small two-line code, which you can put in your robots.txt file, and you can block OpenAI’s new SearchGPT product, Search Engine from coming to your website, and from using your website or content. Now, whether you want to do this or not, this is your decision, you have to make it.
So, this was an overview of OpenAI’s SearchGPT search engine. Now, the quality of SearchGPT answers is better than Google’s AI overviews, but there is nothing surprising about this, because the quality of chat GPT answers is always better than Google’s Gemini answers.
