Interest in AI technology and, more specifically, OpenAI’s ChatGPT product has skyrocketed in recent years.
People are looking for information about both topics.
Source: Google Trends
Millions are writing about ChatGPT across the web…
…and talking about it in various communities.
Interest shot up almost immediately. This is the first couple of weeks after ChatGPT launched to the public.
And as you can tell from the graphs, all of this happened quickly.
Whether your X and LinkedIn feeds have been persistently inundated with threads and posts about AI in general and tools like Claude, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT (like mine), or you’re just stumbling on the topic, you may want answers to two questions before investing your time and energy into learning ChatGPT:
Is ChatGPT specifically likely to be an enduring product?
What does it actually do and what can you personally use it for?
In this article, I’ll help you answer these questions by telling you:
What ChatGPT is.
How it works.
Who built it and is behind the technology.
Why it’s important for SEOs specifically.
Some of the current and likely future uses for it.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot created by OpenAI that can be accessed at https://chatgpt.com/.
As of this writing, there are a few different product offerings:
A free version of the tool, providing access to ChatGPT 4o mini (a specific model).
A Plus plan for $20 per month, which includes extended limits, access to more advanced ChatGPT models (o1 and o1 mini), scheduled tasks, custom GPTs, and limited access to Sora for video creation.
A Pro plan for $200 per month, offering unlimited access to all Plus features, advanced voice capabilities, higher limits for video and screen sharing, an advanced version of the o1 model, and access to Operator, a feature that can perform tasks in a dedicated browser.
Out of the box, the free version’s interface is simple, with an empty dialog to enter a prompt.
The tool can perform various tasks and return text, files, images, and videos in response. Some examples of tasks ChatGPT can execute include:
Answering questions.
Writing things like ads, emails, paragraphs, whole blog posts, or even college papers.
Writing, commenting, or marking up code.
Changing the formatting on a block of text for you.
ChatGPT launched in late November 2022, on the heels of AI Content Generator Jasper.ai receiving $125 million in funding at a $1.5 billion valuation earlier the same month. The tool reached a million users in less than a week.
But each session has a specific cost associated with it.
In the interest of helping fund those costs (and further growth), Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation.
This move, combined with ChatGPT’s growth and word of mouth, might have fueled Google’s subsequent reported concerns about ChatGPT as a possible threat.
Most recently, OpenAI raised another $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion in October 2024.
It’s been rumored that OpenAI is in talks to secure another $40 billion in funding at a $340 billion valuation (on the heels of new competitor DeepSeek, which is rumored to have spent only $5.5 million).
Now that you understand what ChatGPT is, it’s equally important to learn how it works, who built it, and the goals and motivations behind its development.
How does it work and how was it trained?
That said, when using tools like ChatGPT, you will want to know where the information it generates comes from, how it determines what to return as an answer, and how that might change over time.
That way, you can understand what level of trust to put in ChatGPT answers and output, how to craft your prompts better, and what tasks you may want to use it for (or not use it for).
Before you start using ChatGPT for anything, I strongly recommend you check out OpenAI’s blog post about it and become aware of some of its failures and limitations.
There, they have a nice graphic explaining how it works and a more in-depth explanation.
AssemblyAI also has a detailed third-party breakdown of how ChatGPT works, some of its strengths and weaknesses, and several additional sources if you’re looking to dive deeper.
One of the most important things to remember about how ChatGPT works is its limitations. In OpenAI’s own words:
“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.”
Another that’s important to highlight:
“While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior. We’re using the Moderation API to warn or block certain types of unsafe content, but we expect it to have some false negatives and positives for now. We’re eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve this system.”
ChatGPT was fine-tuned on a GPT model that completed training in June 2024, meaning it won’t have knowledge of events that occurred after that unless prompted to access the web.
Who built ChatGPT?
Similarly, understanding who built the application and why is an important background if you hope to use it in your day-to-day work.
Again, ChatGPT is an OpenAI product. Here’s some background on the company and their stated goals:
OpenAI has a non-profit parent organization (OpenAI Inc.) and a for-profit corporation called OpenAI LP (which has a “capped profit” model with a 100x profit cap, at which point the rest of the money flows up to the non-profit entity).
The biggest investor is Microsoft. OpenAI employees also own equity.
Former Y Combinator President Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI and was one of the original founders (along with prominent Silicon Valley personalities such as Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others). Many people ask about Musk’s involvement in the company and ChatGPT. He stepped down as a board member in 2018 and wouldn’t have had any meaningful participation in the development of ChatGPT (which obviously didn’t launch until November 2022). He is also not too fond of Altman and has launched a competitive product through his company X (Grok).
Notable points to consider, whether you’re interested in ChatGPT as an SEO tool or as a potential alternative to Google, include:
ChatGPT has launched its own search engine, ChatGPT Search.
Microsoft’s ongoing involvement, with Microsoft Bing being the second-largest search engine, though still far behind Google.
ChatGPT isn’t specifically designed as an SEO or content tool (though many SEO-focused tools now integrate AI into their products).
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Why should SEOs care about ChatGPT?
There are three core reasons for SEOs to be interested in how the ChatGPT product evolves:
ChatGPT search could eventually be a viable alternative to traditional search (though it seems this is, at the very least, far off).
AI optimization, or showing up prominently not just in ChatGPT search but in ChatGPT responses more broadly (and for responses from similar products like Claude, etc.), is a practice that SEOs are well-positioned to become experts at.
ChatGPT can help with lots of SEO tasks!
Dig deeper: How to gain visibility in generative AI answers: GEO for Perplexity and ChatGPT
Here, I’ll focus on use cases to help perform SEO functions. What follows are ChatGPT’s use cases for SEO.
AI content generation
Generating SEO-focused content with AI is probably the most talked about element of AI and SEO.
From creating blog posts and other content whole cloth to generating images and videos, generating meta descriptions, or editing and rewriting content, ChatGPT and OpenAI’s tools can help with a number of specific functions related to content creation generally and SEO-focused content creation specifically.
An important concern here is how Google thinks about AI content in general.
SEOs need to identify the specific instances where ChatGPT can make them more efficient or enhance their content.
At the same time, it’s crucial to understand the potential risks to rankings and organic traffic when using ChatGPT-generated content in different ways (mainly if you’re relying on content created by writers you don’t have a relationship with).
Dig deeper: Does Google’s helpful content update penalize AI content?
Keyword research and organization
Similarly, there are several specific tasks ChatGPT can execute related to keyword research and optimization, such as:
Suggestions for keywords to target or blog topics.
Keyword clustering or categorization.
A key consideration for SEOs is how this relates to your current and optimal processes for these tasks.
ChatGPT isn’t designed to be an “SEO tool,” so it won’t emphasize search volume, competition, relevance, and co-occurrence like more focused keyword research or organization tools.
Code generation and technical SEO
ChatGPT is helping people generate code and build things, and it’s no different for specific technical SEO tasks.
Depending on the prompts, ChatGPT can help with schema markups, robots.txt directives, redirect codes, and building widgets and free tools to promote via link outreach.
As with any type of content creation, you must QA the code that ChatGPT generates.
If the code ChatGPT generates is incorrect, your site’s template, hosting environment, CMS, and more can break.
Dig deeper: Can AI perform technical SEO analysis effectively?
Link building
ChatGPT can generate lists of outreach targets, emails, free tool ideas, and more that may assist with link building work.
Here again (you may be sensing a theme), two things to keep in mind:
Since ChatGPT was not built to be a link building tool, it may not prioritize opportunities or generate ideas that will specifically help with SEO success.
GPT-3 is trained on old data, so the information you’re getting may be wrong or outdated if you don’t build your prompts very specifically to include specific information from the web.
Dig deeper: How to create linkable assets with ChatGPT
How to think about ChatGPT as an SEO
Ultimately, given its early functionality and reception along with OpenAI’s founding team and investors (and level of investment), ChatGPT will likely have longevity as a tool.
There are a ton of use cases for ChatGPT to help with your daily work, including:
I would encourage SEOs to become familiar with ChatGPT (what it’s capable of and what its shortcomings are), get creative with how you can use it to speed up or improve your current processes, and to get used to carefully checking its output.
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