I’ve been really interested in how AI engines will impact traditional content discovery models. A key hypothesis is that content creators will reduce time-to-citation by:

  • Optimizing content for AI engines
  • Seeding content into AI systems

Meanwhile, it feels as though AI engines will race to achieve “query capture,” the flywheel of user sentiment, trends, and interests that fuels first-party innovation, third-party data sales, and advertising.

Perplexity pioneered search with citations, but I suspect the release of ChatGPT search will accelerate this particular land grab:

The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview. ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners, to provide the information users are looking for.

Interesting to think about how “partners” might expand beyond larger publishers, who exist primarily as a source of training data for the engine, but get the benefit of some amount of prioritized discovery and presentation to users. Maybe smaller publishers and/or individuals will begin seeding AI engines with content as a means of getting discovered?

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