I’ve been exploring 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, 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.

ChatGPT search will surely accelerate this and/or other changes:

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.

While Perplexity pioneered search with citations, OpenAI search will drive the industry forward, despite not being first to market.

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