1.5 Billion people use ChatGPT each month. They trust ChatGPT on the recommendations it provide. That’s a lot of leads that no business can afford to miss out on. But, on what basis does this conversational Ai recommend? How does it know a business is the best in a category?
Note: Am using the PLUS version. In that I chose the ‘Web Browsing’ option. As this browses the web real-time and provides results. More in FAQ
I started by asking ChatGPT: Suggest good mobile app development agencies in Toronto.
One thing I noticed is, ChatGPT was browsing a site called ‘sortlist.com’. The first three results it suggested was from this site. Further investigating I found that ‘Sortlist’ provided a curated list of App development companies.
So I asked ChatGPT the reason why it decided to trust this site for its recommendations. From the reply it provided, seems ChatGPT has a builtin browser like tool that it uses to browse in real-time for the results.
But, I was curious on what search engine it used to browse the internet. So I went ahead and asked ChatGPT, where it searched for the keyword ie. In which search results did the site ‘Sortlist’ show up.
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ChatGPT replied that ‘Sortlist’ was the first site that appeared when it searched for: Best mobile app development agencies in Toronto 2023 ( notice how it added the year at the end without asking me ). What is interesting here is ChatGPT not only relies on a search engine to get results. But it also likes already curated lists. I did a variety of other searches, and in every result ChatGPT seems to be looking for curated lists to pickup from.
But what is this search that ChatGPT does behind the scenes 🤔 ( Tip: in the screenshot above, ChatGPT says ‘Sortlist’ appeared as the first result ). So, I did the same search in Google & Bing to see which produced the same result-set. Both the search engines did not show ‘Sortlist’ as the 1st result.
I asked ChatGPT which search engine it uses in its browser:
ChatGPT is programmed to not reveal the search engine employed in the BG. And I also wont agree its a custom developed search engine. As building a custom search like Google or Bing would be a massive effort and cost.
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FAQ:
- What is your learning from this activity?
I have been a digital marketer for more than a decade now. I follow search engine/ social media changes and algorithms very close. I personally feel ChatGPT is still not using its Ai capabilities to rank-recommend businesses. It just replies using a custom search engine. It may also be a couple of search engine results it compares and picks from. So, we will see a lot more changes in its recommendation engine soon. But, that cannot be the reason to stop optimizing websites to rank in ChatGPT. Simply because you cant miss out on the 1.5 billion people using it regularly every month. I also learnt that ChatGPT for now, depends on curated lists for its recommendations.
- Why did I choose ‘web browsing’ instead of GPT-4?
GPT-4 is an already trained model. Its knowledge is limited to 2021, as that is the last cut off date the model was trained for. And there is no way to also submit new information/ websites to this model. So, to get upto date information from ChatGPT, I would need to use the ‘web browsing’ option. Understanding how conversational Ai recommends businesses in this option is important. As this would be the same manner in which GPT-4 was trained with data from the internet. This will pave way to help push information into the next ChatGPT update ie. GPT-5. I also foresee that the release of up to date trained models will be more frequent soon. So frequent, that OpenAI will not be releasing new models exclusively, but the model will be updated in real-time every hour or so.
