🤖 SearchGPT ranking factors

Hey 👋

I’ve never felt so confident about the future of search for marketers.

The past 18 months have been wild for those who work in content, SEO, and growth.

On one end you have people on LinkedIn (worst place to get marketing advice) saying that Google is dead.

You have business owners asking their marketers to leverage AI to create content.

We’re seeing layoffs.

SEO agencies are struggling.

And on the other end, you have brands and websites secretly crushing it with organic growth (but no one hears about it).

While no one can predict the future, I’ve never been so excited about organic search marketing.

This past week, SearchGPT came out to premium ChatGPT users. And you bet I spent the entire weekend just playing around with it.

TL;DR: It’s not that great (yet).

The experience has not served up to the hype.

I tested:

• A navigational search like “facebook login” and got a link to a fake Facebook website.

• An informational search (the best for AI search) and got some decent results, and discovered some interesting ranking factors I’ll touch on in a sec.

• A transactional search to find cheap flights to Tokyo (which didn’t beat Google’s results).

• A local search for restaurants that were limited in results but it had a great UI.

• A commercial search for the best running shoes and got some pretty good results curated from quality review sites.

Right now, SearchGPT feels like an unfinished product. But I love that OpenAI actually released it so they can get user feedback.

The most interesting thing? I discovered how SearchGPT prioritizes what it links out to in its search results (at least for now).

So far, ranking factors I’ve noticed in order of importance:

1. Domain + brand authority of the website (this is based on relevant backlinks and brand mentions)

2. Keywords (this is based on your on-page SEO: keyword in URL, title, H1 tag)

3. Answering questions in NLP friendly formats

And this made me realize that if you’re maximizing your SEO strategy for Google, it actually reflects well into SearchGPT.

1. Domain + brand authority: Backlinks have always been at the core of Google’s PageRank algorithm. It’s what made the Google results better than any other search engine. Brand mentions have always been important for humans, and brand searches help with overall reputability with Google.

2. Keywords: Yes, “topics” or “questions” are a great way to rebrand what a “keyword” is. But there’s still no doubt that having your pages optimized around specific search terms helps them show up for those search terms — shocker!

3. Answering questions in NLP-friendly formats is historically how you show up in featured snippets and the “People also ask” section on Google.

So this made me ask, “if you’re optimizing for Google, in the most trustworthy and human way possible, does that mean it’s your best chance of showing up in AI search?”

So I went to my referral traffic for Marketer Milk. The #1 referring site, outside of Google, was ChatGPT.

I checked my B2B SaaS client’s website and their #1 referring site, outside of Google, was ChatGPT.

And through all of my deep diving into SearchGPT waters, I realized how much of the results it shows are from publishers and content heavy websites.

If you want your brand to show up for certain questions in AI search, make sure content websites are talking about you. Or, build your own media arm for your website and start talking about yourself in listicle articles. (I go over all of this stuff in my training btw.)

We are still very early into AI search. But this whole experience made me realize how important creating human-first content, that is also optimized for search engines, is —even in a world where search behavior goes towards AI chatbots.

So be weary of people yapping on the internet that Google or SEO is dead. SEO is not limited to just Google.

If you focus on figuring out what people are searching for, and you create the best piece of content to answer that question (both in terms of humans and algorithms), you will be rewarded.

Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Perplexity, YouTube (something I’m experimenting with) — these are all search engines I get traffic from (and I’m sure you do too). Yes, Google brings in like 80% of it today. But even if that Google referring traffic goes down, I know that referring traffic from the other search engines will go up.

Don’t worry too much about the platform. Just focus on building up your OWNED media assets — and make sure they’re optimized for search engines in general.

I’m off to gather more findings. The future of search is bright.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• Finding the right growth strategy for you

• 2 questions to ask when writing copy

• Key insights from AI Overviews

• The best Facebook ads targeting

• Ad in the wild

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• ChatGPT Search is not OpenAI’s ‘Google killer’ yet

• Snapchat shares mixed performance results for Q3

• Meta is developing a search engine to power its AI chatbot

• McKinsey: CMOs feel unprepared as duties pile up

• How iOS 18 will affect your subscriber relationships across channels

• A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

🚀 All things growth & product

Finding the right growth strategy for your product, 0 to 1 lessons from Lattice’s first marketer, and your 30/60/90 day plan as a product marketing manager.

💌 Emails, copywriting, & psychology

Answers to common questions about newsletters, emails you can send to inactive user accounts, 2 questions to ask yourself when writing copy, and the psychology behind memorable brand names.

✍️ SEO & content marketing

Key insights about how AI Overviews work, the future of AI search, and 8 real-world content experience examples.

🤳 Ads, social media, & branding

The best Facebook Ad targeting (10 to 1 ROIs), Facebook benchmarks to help you evaluate your content strategy on FB, and how to make your brand name memorable.

☁️ Random

📣 Ad in the wild

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Associate Product Marketing Specialist @ Zendesk

• Brand Copywriter @ Figma

• Email Marketing Manager @ Postman

• Growth Marketing Manager @ PAX

• VP, Media @ vidIQ

Okay, that's it for now 💛. See you next Tuesday!

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” — Earl Nightingale

Riddle answer: Ten tickles