Welcome And The OpenAI Rumour

Speaker 0:00

Hello, welcome back to SEO Is Not That Hard. It's me here, Ed Dawson, as always, and today I'm gonna be talking about The rumors coming out of OpenAI about a, essentially a Search Console feature. For years we've had Google Search Console, we've had Bing Webmaster Tools. But for ChatGPT, the thing that hundreds of millions of people now talk to before they go to Google is that we've had nothing. No first-party data at all. We've had lots of guesswork. There's lots of websites out there, tools that are scraping and using third-party trackers, which fire prompts at the models and hope their sample means something. But until now, nothing that you could get directly from ChatGPT.

Checking The Source Behind Screenshot

Speaker 0:45

And this week, a screenshot was shared on LinkedIn that suggests this might be about to change And this all came about from a post by a guy called Joazus Kazuneikas. I'm probably mispronouncing his name, but he's the founder of Marketplace Pulse, which is an e-commerce research firm. Now, that matters because I'd never heard of him before, and the first thing I-- you should always do when you see someone claiming something or sharing something is go and look at who they are because sometimes they're just random accounts who are chasing engagement and, people make things up for attention. But this guy actually seems genuine. He's been early on e-commerce stories before. In May, he flagged an Amazon agentic commerce team

What The ChatGPT Dashboard Promises

Speaker 1:28

before most people had noticed. Now, on the sixth of November, he posted screenshots from inside ChatGPT, and there's a banner that says more or less, "Claim your business in ChatGPT," and it claims to offer three things. One, see how often your business is mentioned in ChatGPT conversations. Two, add your latest products and keep your business details up to date. And three, set up a business agent that answers customer questions using information you control. Now the bit SEO, SEOs care about is the first one. So according to this post, it's gonna track two numbers: impressions, that's how many times your business appeared in a ChatGPT response; and clicks, meaning how many times someone clicked a link through to your site. And both are gonna be shown apparently as a daily chart. And it appears to be sitting inside something that they call a business hub. Now, you only get this if you verify that you own the business, and the example he gives is connecting a Shopify store. So w-what we don't know at the moment is what the qualifications are gonna be on how you can verify yourself and what type of sites will be allowed to be verified Now, he says he's seen early versions since August, and the banner on this post appears to suggest that launch might be close. But crucially Here's what it reportedly does not show. That's no prompts, that's no user data, no competitive benchmarks or rankings. So just hold on to that. We'll come back to that, that shortly So why would this be a big deal if OpenAI

Why First Party Data Changes GEO

Speaker 3:04

are to release this tool? There's three reasons. First of all, it's first-party data. Every AI visibility tool on the market today estimates from the outside. What they do is they run a set of prompts, read the answers, and then they try and work out from that what your visibility is. Now, it's useful because it's a sample, but it depends on how good the prompts are that you put in to choose-- that you choose to sample. So if you choose poor prompts to track, you're gonna get poor data back. A number that comes from OpenAI itself would be a proper baseline that none of the tools can reproduce because it will share you across the entire prompt set that you actually turn up for. Secondly, it captures dimensions nobody clicked. So ChatGPT already adds a UTM tag on links, so you can see if someone-- some of your ChatGPT referral traffic in your analytics data or in your logs. What you can't see, though, is every time that ChatGPT named you and the user just read the answer and moved on. And for a lot of businesses, that's most of the value. If you're mentioned three times a day to somebody, ramp that up over a thousand people, but you only get forty clicks, that tells you that ChatGPT is using you as a context rather than as a destination. And that's a very different piece of strategy that you're gonna have to think about how you work with that. Thirdly, it gives GEO Generative Engine Optimization, a, a scorecard. So if you change your product data, restructure your content, or you get coverage on other sites, ChatGPT tends to draw from, you could actually see whether impressions moved. Not perfectly, but it will give you a direction of travel as you make changes and do work. The practical way to use it, if it ships as it's described, would be alongside third-party tools, not instead of them, because if they're not giving you prompts, then you're gonna have to go out and do that prompt tracking yourself to see how you compare. Cause Open AI numbers will tell you what happened, the prompt trackers will help you try and work out why But there's one thing would say right now, I would very much expect your click numbers in this will look tiny we've heard last year in OpenAI reporting that The click-through rates on from impressions to actual visits to websites is tiny. 2% apparently is really good. Most sites go well below 1%, so you're gonna see much smaller click-through rates than you do on Google. But that's nothing to panic about because it's just how search works these days. You use-- we're all seeing it. Less people, but you still get customers. It just that you're on... You, they are researching you higher up and in other places before they actually come to you. Before with Google, it was like you would discover the sources and go and read them direct and work with them, so like on your site. Now people tend to work off your site. It's the agents, it's the LLMs that are doing the fetching, finding, and then sharing that with people. Then when they come to purchase, that's when they arrive. Now the unknowns.

Unknowns About Impressions Access APIs

Speaker 6:12

This is the thing, this is where we've got to be honest. There's a lot we don't know about this, and some of it matters a lot. The biggest one is what counts as an impression. Is it your brand name appearing in the text, a product card, your page being cited as a source? These are all different events. A retailer could be named without any of its pages being used, and a publisher's article can be cited in an answer about somebody else's product. So until OpenAI defines what an impression is, we don't know what the chart is measuring. And connected to that is, does a business mentioned four times in one conversation get one impression or four? Again, we just don't know Secondly, we don't know who's gonna get access. The only route that we can see from this image that's been shared is someone who's connected a Shopify store. What about a law firm? What about a plumber? What about a SaaS company or a publisher? We just don't know whether they can verify at all, and we also don't know which countries it's gonna launch in. So if you're listening from the UK, don't assume from day one that you're gonna be able to access this. Then the practical stuff. SEO experts always ask about, is there an export, an API? How far back does the data go? None of this we know. And finally, how it connects to the paid side. ChatGPT ads are already a billion-dollar business, and OpenAI is testing sponsored agents with advertisers, so the business hub also offers a business agent. Is the free dashboard a stepping stone to the ads product? Possibly, but again, nobody knows. Nobody's confirmed it either way And finally, I wanna talk about the overclaims because there's lots of people talking about this over this weekend, and there are four things

Four Overclaims To Stop Repeating

Speaker 7:45

that we need to be s- really straight on. First of all, people are saying OpenAI has launched OpenAI or OpenAI confirms. No, it hasn't. OpenAI has said nothing. It isn't in the release notes, and its small business an- announcement from July doesn't mention it. So every article you've seen traces back to one man's screenshots. Now, I think the post is credible, but credible and confirmed are not the same thing, and features that, that are in testing can get pulled all the time. So this isn't confirmed yet by OpenAI. Secondly, citation tracking. Several headlines I've seen say this tool tracks citations. Neither the banner nor the post mention citations. It talks about mentions and clicks. That isn't hair-splitting. For publishers, whether you are the source is the whole question. Thirdly, it's a search console for ChatGPT. Now, that's a handy shortcut, but compare it to what SEOs actually ask for. The kind of wish list for an AI search console with the kind of features that we get in Google Search Console is not what we're seeing here. If this just shows impressions, clicks, and a trend line, it's not giving us queries, it's not giving us devices, it's not giving us country splits, it's not giving crawl data. It's... there's no API. It's just a score card on a couple of metrics to start, but it's not what you're gonna expect if you're thinking search console in Google terms. Fourth, that final attribution. Even if we see this and it ships, the clicks will undercount ChatGPT's actual influence, and that's because most people in ChatGPT will discover you, have conversations about you and your product area and the industry that you work in. And when they finally decide to visit you, they're probably gonna either type your URL in or go to Google and remind themselves of the URL because they are not necessarily-- And I've seen this myself because I do this when I'm using LLMs to make decisions, search decisions, and product buy decisions. I will quite often talk about it within the LLM, think, go away, think about it, then come back and Google the company or the product just to get the link to the first place to go and buy it. So the click-through data is not necessarily gonna be great attribution data as to where people actually came from So where does this leave

Practical Next Steps For Tracking

Speaker 10:07

us? It's a credible sighting of a- an actual dashboard that could be the kind of thing that could be really powerful for SEOs. There's a couple of other things in there as well that are really interesting. The fact it's suggesting that you're gonna be able to put data into OpenAI yourself and even have bots answer with your own context. So y- it could be a way of sharing data into OpenAI, as well as getting that search console kind of citation and impression and click data back the other way, which is in many ways a lot more than Search Console and Google allows you to do. So it could be something really interesting and a way that you can keep your information up to date and even get ChatGPT answering questions for potential customers using data directly from yourself rather than it being crawled. But again, like with the Search Console, there's a lot, there's a lot of data here we don't know. There's a lot of fea- features we don't know. We've only got one screenshot with three headings, essentially. But it's interesting. It shows that it's actually gonna happen 'cause I just had an email just the other day from a listener asking, "Are we gonna see a search console for ChatGPT?" And I said... That was on, I think, maybe Wednesday last week, and I said, "I don't know. I have no idea because there isn't now. Maybe they will, maybe they won't." But this is the first indication that actually maybe they will. So a bit clairvoyant there from listener Steve. Thanks for dropping that question in. It was interesting to see that this came out straight away after it. But my advice at the moment is going forward, don't throw out your tracking tools because there's a lot of data that this isn't gonna share, I don't think. And also, those tracking tools are valuable for the other LLMs who may or may not create search consoles themselves. I su- suspect they probably will if OpenAI do launch this, 'cause they do tend to copy each other a lot. But I still think those tracking tools are gonna be important, especially if all we get is clicks and impressions from this search console that OpenAI are proposing But it's gonna be very interesting to see if this does roll out, and if any listener out there, if any of you do get offered this or it does come up as something you can try, 'cause I suspect it won't roll- necessarily roll out to everybody immediately when it does roll out, then do let me know. I'd love to hear about it. So that's it for this one.

Wrap Up And Listener Request

Speaker 12:26

Thanks for listening, and until next time, take care of yourselves, and I'll see you next time.