ChatGPT: What Could It Mean For SEO?

In SEO circles, it seems like we’ve been on the cusp of the ‘next big revolution’ for a while now. After all, for more consecutive years than we care to count, we have been promised that this will finally be “the year of voice search” – only to see little actual change in user behavior to make that prediction a reality.

Tech revolutions tend to occur when services reach the masses and initiate significant behavioral change. They also often occur at breathtaking speed. ChatGPT ticks all of these boxes. After all, even as recently as late November 2022, nobody (or at least, very few people) was searching for information about ChatGPT:

If you’ve paid even just a passing interest in the digital space since early December, you’re likely to have heard of ChatGPT. This AI-powered chatbot can deliver information in human-style conversations at lightning speed. The Internet and social media is already abuzz with the myriad of ways this can change our lives – from meal planning, to what to buy a 5-year-old for Christmas, to seemingly producing dozens of articles about financial planning on a reputable news site.

But what are the implications of ChatGPT – and AI tools in general – for SEO? How will this influence SEOs and their decisions? With ChatGPT discussions dominating Twitter threads, media roundtables, and yes, even Knucklepuck’s Slack channels, we wanted to dive deeper into how ChatGPT could impact the SEO space in the months and years ahead.

What Is ChatGPT – And How Does it Work?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot, developed by the San Francisco startup, OpenAI. It is the latest iteration of “large language models”, following OpenAI’s GPT-3 model which was launched in 2020. Microsoft made a $1 billion investment in OpenAI back in 2019.

So what makes ChatGPT so remarkable, compared with its predecessors?

• It is (currently) available for free to anyone with an Internet connection
• Its design is intended to be more user-friendly and easier to interact with
• The level of detail in its responses appear to surpass previous iterations of the technology

If you haven’t used it yet, it is pretty simple to get started. After signing up for your account at chat.openai.com, you start with your input on….virtually anything, and watch ChatGPT work its magic.

The Effect of ChatGPT on SEO

The potential for ChatGPT to be integrated within SEO workflows and outputs is an intriguing one. On the one hand, it has the potential to automate and improve the efficiency of several data-heavy, time-intensive tasks. On the other, if the majority of SEOs start wielding the power of ChatGPT with reckless abandon, where is the unique value coming from – and what if Google starts to heavily penalize AI-generated content?

As ever, when new technology emerges, there are typically three distinct groups of people. There are the early adopters – those keen to use the tech in any and every way they can, without regard for long-term consequences. Then there are the skeptics – those who are resistant to change in any shape or form. And finally, there are the people in the middle – those who dip their toes in the water, but don’t want to completely submerge themselves until they know what they’re getting themselves into.

At Knucklepuck, we fall squarely into that third group. We see how AI can make our SEO workflows more efficient, and we understand how we could potentially leverage it to deliver more value for our clients.

However, we also see the obvious risks. For example, using AI content at scale is a huge risk that could leave sites vulnerable to sitewide penalties. And even prior to that danger – if you’re using the same approach as everybody else, how is your content delivering unique, engaging value to your readers?

Google’s Opinion on AI Generated Content

With around 90% of the search market cornered, Google exerts more influence than any other entity when it comes to how ChatGPT and other AI tools may be used with in conjunction with SEO strategies. And Google has been clear on this topic for a while now, as Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller outlined in April 2022 when asked about how Google treats AI generated content:

“For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.

And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kind of things.

My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”

The inherent risks of AI content – inaccuracy and plagiarism – are naturally difficult to spot, and will only continue to become harder to detect as tools like ChatGPT are used at scale. Of course, from an SEO perspective, we can see the downsides of using ChatGPT to automatically produce blog content – but the tool could be used in similar ways for other negative means. Imagine if it started producing college-level dissertations for everyone, or created harmful propaganda or misinformation at unprecedented scale. The effects on society could be devastating.

With this in mind, OpenAI has taken safety measures to try and protect against malicious use. In June 2022, OpenAI hired Scott Aaronson, a prominent computer scientist, to work on AI Safety and Alignment. As part of Aaronson’s efforts, ChatGPT is aiming to introduce a ‘watermark’ to its content which will in effect allow Google and others to identify if the content was lifted directly from the chatbot. The watermark will be a statistical, psuedorandom combination of letters, words, numbers or punctuation marks which will be undetectable to humans, as Aaronson explains:

“My main project so far has been a tool for statistically watermarking the outputs of a text model like GPT. Basically, whenever GPT generates some long text, we want there to be an otherwise unnoticeable secret signal in its choices of words, which you can use to prove later that, yes, this came from GPT.”

What About Bing?

It was announced in early January that Microsoft is planning to integrate ChatGPT’s output with its Bing search engine, with the rollout beginning in March.

With an existing $1 billion investment in OpenAI, and a huge deficit to Google in the share of the search market, the incentive is there for Microsoft and other competitors to take a chance on AI technology to help them bridge the gap to Google.

How ChatGPT outputs may be displayed in Bing search results – and the extent to which this may impact keyword positioning for websites on Bing – remains to be seen.

Followed through to its natural conclusion, though, there is the potential for huge divergence and difference across the two search platforms. After all, if Bing is relying heavily on AI generated content to answer search queries, but Google is essentially saying AI content is persona non grata, then the two platforms may start to provide wildly different results for the exact same query.

Knucklepuck’s Current Position On ChatGPT, AI Content and SEO

For clients and other interested parties who have asked us about ChatGPT and its potential impact on SEO and Paid Media, our current advice has been very clear – let’s wait and see.

Right now – just six weeks into ChatGPT’s public release – we simply do not have enough solid data to draw conclusions on ChatGPT’s effect on SEO. Changing successful strategies or proven formulas because there’s a new shiny toy in existence would not be a wise move, particularly when there is no long-term data to support (or disprove) their overall benefits.

But that doesn’t mean that we, and you, shouldn’t experiment with tools like ChatGPT in the interim. This tech is exciting, and finding out ways to utilize it to make our work more efficient and less time-consuming is a worthwhile endeavor. There’s little doubt that ChatGPT and other similar services are here to stay – but not even AI can predict to what extent they will impact SEO, digital marketing, and the world at large. At least not yet.

Note: Although I was tempted to prompt ChatGPT with the talking points in this article, this content was 100% produced by a human.