ChatGPT Atlas: Is SEO in Trouble?

I wanna show you how this is going to affect SEO

and search overall.

So based on my early testing here,

and I have proof of this already,

that when you run your search,

it is actually only pulling from the static corpus,

meaning it is not using retrieval.

And if you don't know what retrieval is,

it just means that when ChatGBT does not know an answer

based on its training data, it goes to retrieval sources.

So that's gonna be public search engines,

it's gonna pull from APIs,

that might be its direct partnership with Reddit

and other media providers.

So it's gonna go and retrieve information,

it's gonna come back here,

and it's going to enhance its prompting

and ultimately enhance that response

so that it's more accurate.

But in this case, it is not functioning

like the actual ChatGBT product.

This is functioning a little bit different,

and it looks like they're just pulling

from the static corpus.

So there's a possibility that this might just be GPT-4,

it could be GPT-5, I'm not sure, they haven't quite said.

But based on what I'm seeing here,

this is not current information.

And that means retrieval is not being used.

And you might say, okay, well, how does this,

what we're seeing here, how does that prove that?

Well, let's go ahead and take a look

at a few other examples, okay?

So what are the best stocks to buy right now, okay?

I don't have real-time access to financial data, okay?

So that's the first one, that's already evidence

that it is not going and retrieving any information.

Gonna go over here, who's in the World Series in 2025?

The 2025 World Series hasn't happened yet, right?

So it could have easily used retrieval

to go and get that information and come back and answer that.

So right now, clearly they're not using retrieval,

at least in its current state, okay?

And then another one here, where should I travel?

Once again, this should be something

that should be current, they should go after it.

But once again, it's just pulling

from the static training data.

It did get this one right, what's the date today?

So it did know that it was the 22nd, so it did that right.

But then when I asked, what was the score

of last night's Lakers game?

Once again, it can't provide that information,

it just tells me to go to a website.

But then when we compare this to standard chat GBT,

so I'm actually inside of chat GBT right now,

not just like the standard browser search,

you can see right now, as it goes

through the reasoning process,

it's actually gonna go and use retrieval

because I'm asking something

that requires up-to-date information, okay?

And you can see, as it goes through reasoning,

it's not actually pulling from the static corpus here,

it's going and retrieving this information,

it's coming back and it's summarizing the information

based on its retrieval source that it used.

Based on this, it didn't actually tell us

where it got that information,

it didn't tell us what the retrieval source was,

but we know for a fact that it used retrieval

because it does not have access to this information

because GPT-5, I think the training cutoff

was November 2024, so it's been a long time, right?

They don't have anything after that point,

they do not have information, so they have to use retrieval.

So if you want up-to-date information

and you're using Shaq GPT,

you should just use the actual product as of right now,

the browser itself is not super good

for current information, right?

So that's the first bar,

we know the standard default experience here

is just the static corpus.

Now, what's interesting is when we click on search, okay?

So let's take a look at this,

this is where things start to get pretty interesting, right?

So now what we see here is we actually do see

that it is going to search.

And when we look at this, funny enough,

this is literally just Google search, okay?

Like this is like actually just Google search

without the SERP features.

So you see that there's no AI overview,

obviously showing up in Shaq GPT,

but then like the standard results,

and also all of these video packs

and all the various SERP features,

they've actually just made it really fascinating

because it's basically just the blue links, right?

So we're back to the blue link era of SEO here

on this tab, it's literally 10 blue links.

So they've basically just eliminated

all of the SERP features

and just left only the 10 blue links,

which I think is kind of cool.

It's kind of old school,

but whether people will use this tab or not,

that remains to be seen,

but more than likely what will happen is

this home tab will also use retrieval.

So it will actually render this tab probably useless

and no one will probably go here.

But in general, it is interesting

that they're actually using Google

to serve up these results and not using Bing.

So I think that's quite fascinating.

And then there's obviously the images tab

and there's a videos tab.

So they've kind of segmented these out.

So instead of putting the videos

in the traditional search results,

they've put them in a separate tab.

So you've got all your videos kind of all lined up here.

So just once again,

kind of a different experience altogether,

which I think is kind of nice

because the SERP features to be honest,

they're quite aggressive on Google.

So I think this is kind of an interesting idea.

And then obviously in the new section,

so they've got all these different sections here

and like I said, this is literally just Google,

but inside of ChatGBT.

So I don't know what the advantage is here

as to why you would use ChatGBT versus using Google Chrome.

But it is interesting that basically at this point,

there's not a situation where ChatGBT

is going to kill Google based on what we're seeing here.

Because I think they've just decided

that it's just keep your enemies closer type of situation.

And they're just gonna work with Google

instead of trying to compete against it.

So nothing wildly new here.

So you're not gonna have to modify your SEO strategy

basically at all.

All you have to do is continue to just do SEO

the way you've always done it.

And once again, proving that ranking on Google

is the number one way to influence

the AI generated responses.

So you have to become the source of retrieval

and not just with your own website,

but your brand needs to be present

across all sources of retrieval.

That is the way that you do it.

And so you wanna try to occupy as many spots

on the first page as possible.

So no need to freak out about this new product from ChatGBT.

I'm sure it will get a good amount of users,

but I don't see it replacing Google Chrome anytime soon.