How people search with ChatGPT
Or do they?
I recently gained access to an Aiso tool, which provides real prompts people use with ChatGPT, along with ChatGPT’s corresponding outputs. The queries are, of course, anonymized. This dataset was truly eye-opening. 🤯
Understanding how it works conceptually is one thing, seeing it firsthand is another. I’ll explain the tool’s functionality and then share some interesting findings.
How it works
You simply enter a topic, entity, or query you’re interested in to search through conversations.
The tool then identifies several conversations with the highest similarity to your input.
You can narrow your search by providing more context, such as your business type, primary country, and audience insights. This will make the search result more tailored to your needs.
What I found out with Aiso
Some discoveries were anticipated, yet still striking to witness directly. Others were quite unexpected for me personally.
People don’t really search for your company. People just want to complete their own tasks
Almost all prompts to ChatGPT were not attempts to find something on the web. I’d say on the contrary, most people were looking to solve a problem or accomplish a task. They were quite rarely searching for the product or service to buy. In the SEO example mentioned earlier, people were:
- Asking for meta descriptions to be created for them
- Seeking help to write proposals for their own SEO services
- Inquiring about marketing techniques for SEO
- Requesting copy for their digital marketing agency
- Even asking for an SEO audit for a client (oopsie!)
Absolutely none of them were looking to buy an SEO tool, a course, go to some website or whatever else. They had a concrete task in mind and sought to complete it quickly, easily, and for free.
The “free” aspect is extremely significant and should not be overlooked. I observed a whopping number of requests for free OpenAI API key to ChatGPT. Some even included justifications why ChatGPT should issue them one.
Because I’ve been working with optimizing for personal and company brands for a while, I’ve digged in to see if anyone was looking for similar services. No one. People were looking for immediate done for them solutions:
- Help with creating or choosing the right brand name
- Guidance on branding and strategic choices
- Writing essays and even books on the topic.
Things got worse when I added SEO to that: personal brand SEO. All the results were dummy prompts in an attempt to generate some kind of SEO spam on a similar topic.
Also, no one was searching for the best SEO expert. Not A Single Person! 😢 Instead, all the searchers were asking ChatGPT to act as the best SEO expert to make some SEO task for them.
The prompts were a way shorter than I expected
We know that queries people make to AI Mode and AI-powered search are much longer and complex compared to a simple prehistoric search people made to get ten blue links in ancient times. I was expecting lengthy prompts with extensive context and the detailed thought processes people go through to get better results from their prompting. To my amazement, almost all the prompts I’ve seen so far were remarkably short. People aren’t providing that much context as I expected. On the contrary, they are quite lazy with that and expect from ChatGPT to get what they think of all by itself.
These prompts are also often quite generic. People expect to receive a unique, authentic response from very generic inputs. Reviewing the output and subsequent chat conversations, it’s clear they often get annoyed with the general responses they receive, yet this doesn’t prompt them to provide more context to improve the output.
Many prompts just ask to write about something without any background or context at all.
Many prompts are around digital marketing or business ideation
From looking for digital marketing ideas and strategies to a particular Youtube shorts ad design, many queries are around marketing and sometimes, business management. Even when the user searches for something like: what is the best SAAS company.
It may be that they are doing that for research purposes for themselves. Often, they are not actually looking for the best company. They want to craft their own message, research the market, generate ideas for their own business, understand what data ChatGPT has and whatnot.
When looking with transactional queries, people try to find the best price or rare items
Excluding the cases when they appear to be researching the market, what I noticed from the so-called transactional queries is that at the moment people either search for something genuinely difficult to find. Or they are looking for the best price for the product of their choice.
In these instances, the conversations are brief, usually consisting of just one prompt.
ChatGPT lists brands more often than I initially thought
Not always, but quite often, ChatGPT suggests brands and then directs the user to search for them on the web or visit their websites for further information. But mostly it only happens when the user asks for something like that directly.
No conclusion
I believe everyone should try to get into that kind of data and analyze it themselves. Of course, it is new, it is evolving, it will change. But this is where you can truly see how people interact with chatbots, what problems they’re trying to solve, and the semantics they use. You’ll likely soon realize that people are generally not looking for you. They are looking to solve their own problems or pursue their own interests. This insight will radically change how you approach your digital marketing now, at these times. Good luck!
