ChatGPT is an AI assistant from the US company OpenAI. It was released in November 2022 and brought AI chatbots to a mass audience within a few months. ChatGPT runs on OpenAI’s GPT models, which are large language models.
You ask a question in everyday language, ChatGPT replies conversationally and can take follow-up questions into account.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT answers in two ways:
- from the knowledge the model learned during training – with a cut-off date after which it knows nothing
- via a built-in web search that retrieves current pages and links to them as sources
Which route it takes depends on the question. For buying decisions, provider comparisons or current topics, ChatGPT often searches the web.
Why does ChatGPT matter?
Many people now use ChatGPT like a search engine: to compare products, find a medical practice or choose software. If you are not named there, you are missing from a growing part of research – in addition to Google, not instead of it.
You get named when ChatGPT finds your pages and knows your brand from trustworthy sources: your own content that answers questions clearly, mentions on other websites and a robots.txt that allows OpenAI’s crawlers. With ongoing GEO management, you measure for which questions ChatGPT recommends you and close the gaps in a targeted way.
