> The results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid placements, but organic results. “They are not ads,” says Fry. “They are not sponsored.”

We all know that won't be the case forever. But I'm also pessimistically interested in the modern SEO tactics of optimizing your product to appear in model outputs.

Are these LLM models going the way of search and social media? Optimize them for selling product, optimize them for engagement (to sell products). They become ad machines - and it's gonna be really hard to tell. There is already evidence [1] that you can optimize LLMs for engagement. Hopefully open source can keep this in check... but I'm not optimistic.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06135 - Rewarding Chatbots for Real-World Engagement with Millions of Users

Google is corrupted with over half the search results being related to buying something. I search for regular words and it's interpreted as a brand or product.

If that happens to ChatGPT, it's useless to me.

I suspect the free version will tilt more in this direction until it becomes worse than useless. The current free offering is honestly too good to be true at present.

I can certainly see the potential: both for this to be really useful at the start and progressively move toward the useless as someone figures out they can get a big bonus if they sell sponsorship within it.

This last weekend I was using ChatGPT to help me select complementary neutral and trim colors for a room where I’d already picked out the accent wall color and other decor, because I got tired of wading through SEO-spam interior design blogs. I gave it quite a bit of detail about my general style, lighting conditions, even things like the various woods used in my flooring and furniture so it could be conscious of complementary undertones.

It would’ve been convenient if once I had the list from the conversation, I could’ve asked it to just order the sample paint chips from Benjamin Moore and have them sent to me. And by that point it knew quite a bit about the size and features of the room, maybe it could have added some requisite supplies to my Home Depot cart for pickup…

The real value is a tool that can act on all the conversational context in a relatively vendor agnostic way. Take my entire plan and use various agents to make it happen.

It took them less than I thought.

We are gonna have fun with "can you suggest me a product to do XYZ"?

At least until now you could run a search to compare, etc. ...Imagine how biased the results can be when you ask "show the pro/con of each".

Less and less trustworthy.

> The results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid placements, but organic results.

Aaaaaaand it’s gone. Please step aside, this chat is for people who will actually buy the sponsored products. Next please!

>The results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid placements, but organic results. “They are not ads,” says Fry. “They are not sponsored.”

What does ChatGPT use to do web searches? Is it Bing with sponsored results removed?

It begins...

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Wake me up when ChatGPT can buy me a new nvidia 50 series GPU at MSRP.