Ben Farrar - Jaywing Australia's Head of Paid Media - gives his thoughts on the future of search using SearchGPT.
Over the past 20+ years, Google has become deeply embedded in how society finds information online, and it will take something significantly better to change that.
I don’t think SearchGPT fits that criteria. Here's why:
Habits are hard to change
While it’s different from a standard search, it’s not transformative enough to change habits anytime soon. Take TikTok as an example—more and more people use the video platform to search, but it still hasn’t slowed Google down.
Limited results
SearchGPT also appears to show results only from publishers who have agreed to appear. Until they find a way to scale that, their search results will be severely limited in terms of the number of websites that can appear.
Issues with monetisation
There’s still a lot of debate about how SearchGPT will be monetised, so it’s too early for marketers to jump to conclusions about how it will work and its potential impact.
Searches likely to be too broad
With searches on the new platform likely to be long-tail and broad, it’s unlikely that they’ll adopt the keyword bidding model that made Google so successful. In fact, even Google has been moving away from that model towards a more intent and context-based search system.
Google offers more advanced tracking
Google has the advantage of a massive tracking ecosystem that provides them with the data they need to categorise web users. Open AI still has a lot to do if they want to match Google in that regard.
While OpenAI and AI in general are changing the landscape, I don’t see Search and search behaviours changing anytime soon. So what does that mean for marketers? They'd do well to focus on what’s working and not get distracted by the new shiny toy.